Our Blog - Guérande, France

We didn't actually visit the town of Guérande, but only visited one of the salt producers. We had booked a guided visit but it was raining when we arrived and the tour had been canceled. Instead, we watched a video that talked about the process used in the salterns (salt marshes) and then had a little talk by one of the young ladies that works there. In general, salt comes from two places: salt mines and by the evaporation of seawater. We had already toured a salt mine during a visit to Krakow and this time, we stopped by to understand the process of evaporation of seawater.

Different natural salts have different mineralities depending on their source, giving each one a unique flavor. For sea salt, there is normally "gros sel" (coarse salt), "Sel fin" (fine salt or table salt), and Fleur de sel (finishing salt). Within the salt marshes, the coarse salt and fleur de sel are produced, and then course salt is ground to make fine salt. The salt from Guérande is fairy well-known and can be ordered on Amazon (Gros sel and Fleur de Sel), as well as salt from the Camargue (a salt-producing region in the South-East of France).

A major source of salt is seawater, which has a salinity of approximately 3.5%. Salt evaporation ponds are filled from the ocean and salt crystals can be harvested as the water dries up. Sometimes these ponds have vivid colors, as some species of algae and other micro-organisms thrive in conditions of high salinity

We started with a video that explained in detail how the salt marshes work, and the job of the paludiers. We picked this specific salt producer because they allowed puppies!

And here is the 5-minute course on salt production. Here you can see an example salt evaporation pond group. The sea water flows into this grouping and then makes its way through a set of ponds. In each phase, the evaporation concentrates the amount of salt in the remaining water. The first step is a set of ponds called vasières and adernes. From there, they go into basins where the salt is harvested. Harvesting normally takes place from June to September as those are the months where the temperature and winds help in the evaporation. The rest of the year, the paludiers (salt workers) do lots of cleaning and maintenance of the various basins. For the fleur de sel, little "petals" of salt are skimmed off the top, while the course salt is harvested by scraping the larger crystals from the bottom of the basin where they have dropped. The course salt from Brittany is normally gray in color and fairly moist, while salt harvested from the Mediterranean is dryer and naturally white.

In the discussion, the young lady explained that at the height of the salt production here, there were thousands of people working in the salt marshes, but exploitation of the salt marshes here was nearly abandoned around 1970. A small group of people formed a cooperative to revitalize the industry and it is bouncing back. There are schools which offer programs specifically for becoming a paludier and each year, more of the abandoned salt marshes are brought back to life. On average, the Guérande saltworks produce around 10,000 tonnes of salt each year, a much lower production in quantity than the saltworks on the Mediterranean coast. There are two main reasons for this. First is just weather ... it is warmer in the Mediterranean and, therefore, you have a longer harvesting season. Also, the salt production in Guérande is very "manual", with people walking on the banks with various tools and manually harvesting the salt on a daily basis. In the Mediterranean, it tends to be a more industrial production.