a salt worker from the island of Oléron explains how a salt marsh works

“It’s very simple the salt marsh… It’s just a pipe with a plug and the water circulates by gravity. The salt marsh is all about controlling the water from pond to pond so that it evaporates as much as possible and concentrates”explains the salt worker Guillaume Bonatti to the magazine “L’été de 8:30 p.m. on Sunday” (replay).

“To make salt, you need five elements: seawater, wind, sun, impermeable soil, like clay here, and a salt worker who controls the water”specifies the one who revived a tradition and revived an ancestral know-how which had disappeared on the island of Oléron, in Charente-Maritime, with his partner Amandine Glinche, originally like him from Le Mans, in Sarthe.

“There is a little magician side”

“You have to get the water to evaporate with the wind and the sun. It’s a bit like drying your laundry. The more wind and sun there is, the more the laundry will dry. That’s exactly the same thing with evaporation. There is a little chemical side and a little magician side: we take a liquid state to arrive at a solid state”adds Amandine’s high school friend, with whom he spent his holidays on the island as a child.

“The salt marsh is very old. It was the Phoenicians who brought the knowledge and the Romans perfected it by making small squares so that a man could harvest around a basin. It’s a very old craft and there have been very few innovations: when the level is reached, you just have to close it with the cap. It’s very simple… but very ingenious”believes Guillaume Bonatti.

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