Abandoned Salt Pans (2)
These salt pans could hardly have been built at a more suitable location.
They stand in the south-eastern corner of Spain on the edge of a region which has been identified as the driest in Europe. Throughout the summer the days are hot and dry - and in the winter they are reasonably warm and hardly ever wet. Thus, conditions were ideal for the evaporation of water from these shallow pans - but that was not all; any other location in the region would offer this advantage; the "salinas de Marchamalo" had something more.
The pans at this salterns were fed with water from the Mar Menor, a little inland sea which - being almost land-locked - is already extremely salty. Every day the water flows into the lake through the entrance canals, but not a lot of it leaves by that way; it tends to evaporate.
And the Mar Menor, in turn, takes its water from the Mediterranean, the sea "in the middle of the land". Being, also, virtually land-locked it too takes in more water than it ever gives out, and as a result, it is rather saltier the Atlantic Ocean.
With such a distinct head start, one feels, the owners of this salterns ought to have made a mint. Presumably they did not; the pans was abandoned, some ten years ago, having become economically non-viable. The problem is apparently one of size. Bigger salterns, with a bigger turn over, were able to afford to install the machinery needed to harvest and process the salt. Another salterns, at the far end of the Mar Menor, is still operating, as are the massive pans at Torrevieja, some fifty miles to the north.