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.
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