Sea Salt from Les Valencières

Emmanuelle, our hotel’s tour guide took us to visit one of many Vendée area marais salants, or wetland salt farms. Along the road we passed once-rectangular, now overgrown marais salants, as well as active ones. When we arrived at Les Valencières and met the salt farmer, or saunier, we learned that he had restored an abandoned marais salant to create his working salt farm.

 

We could see the picturesque village of Bouin from Thierry Odéon’s sea salt salorge, the hut where he keeps his tools and sells fleur de sel. We all sat inside the salorge while Thierry explained his process.

Although harvesting salt from the ocean has a science to it, the method is a simple harnessing of nature’s gifts in nature’s time. Grids of basins are dug so that high tides can deposit saltwater in the basins. Both sun and wind are needed to evaporate the water, leaving white salt, which the saunier then rakes up. The earth in this region is rich in a gray clay that enhances evaporation, so Thierry creates his grid of trenches from that gray clay.

 

Thierry controls the flow of water with a very simple, primitive really, method of plugging and unplugging a hole in a tiny écluse, or lock, with a weather-beaten wooden stick. In this photo, you can also see gray clay, dry and cracked during low tide. The deep-green, low plant growing in the clay is salicorne, which we broke off pieces of to eat. It tasted salty with a nice crunch.

A few interesting tidbits unrelated to the business … Black and white wading birds called avocettes find shelter from their predators in the salt marshes because foxes don’t like salt. Fish find the marais salants’ basins way too salty, so they are not a problem for sauniers.

On our way back to the hotel, we got even better at recognizing abandoned versus active marais salants across the landscape. And now we also recognized dark brown salorges dotting fields with hand-painted signs by the road inviting people to buy their fleur de sel.