Atlantic Scales

The Valle Salado de Añana, in Álava in the Basque Country, is the oldest active salt-production site in the world. Continuous salt extraction has gone on here for more than seven thousand years — from the Neolithic onward; in 902 the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña was already documented mining salt at the valley, and in 1140 the town of Salinas de Añana was granted a royal charter by King Alfonso VI partly because of the strategic and economic importance of its salt. The geology is the inheritance: the valley sits on a vast subterranean salt deposit left by an ancient sea that disappeared some two hundred million years ago, in the Triassic period. Rainwater percolates through the deep salt and resurfaces as concentrated brine through four natural springs at roughly seven times Atlantic salinity. The brine is channelled by gravity through pinewood aqueducts to hundreds of evaporation terraces of dry stone, wood and clay, where the salt is extracted by sun and wind. No pumping, no electricity. The site is a Bien de Interés Cultural, a UNESCO tentative-list World Heritage candidate, and a FAO Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System. Atlantic Scales is the flor de sal of the valley — the delicate surface crystals that form on warm, still days, harvested by hand into pyramid-shaped, snow-white grains.