Coarse Salt from Île de Ré

The salt marshes of the Île de Ré, the Atlantic island off Charente-Maritime, were first developed between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by the monks of Saint-Michel-en-l’Herm. By the nineteenth century the marshes covered nearly a fifth of the island’s surface, and a thousand sauniers worked them. The decline of artisanal production in the twentieth century, under pressure from industrial salt and rail, was met with an organising response: a Syndicat de vente in 1901; a Comité de défense salicole in 1911; an Association de vente en commun in 1933; and in 1942 the formal founding of the Coopérative des Sauniers de l’Île de Ré, the cooperative that today unites most of the island’s producers across more than four hundred hectares of marsh. In 2023 the island’s salt and Fleur de Sel received IGP status from the European Union. The method has not changed in a thousand years: coarse salt forms at the bottom of the natural clay basins; it is harvested manually with a simoussi, piled into pyramids on the edge of the pond, left to dry, transported for September packaging. No chemical weedkillers, no washing, no leaching, no post-harvest additives, no liners on the basin floors. The grey tint comes from the natural clay and trace minerals absorbed during crystallisation.