Tag Archives: salt

Since ancient times, salt has played a key role in the lives of human beings. Used primarily as a means of preserving foodstuffs, it acquired vital importance during the Roman Empire, and is the derivation of the word “salary”. This was because it was common practice in Rome for employees of the Empire, such as legionaries, to receive their wages (or salaries) in salt, as payment for their services. The areas where salt was extracted became so important strategically that some of them were walled and settlements were created to defend this asset. The oldest known record of Portuguese salt …

Loulé. There are six of us inflicting this on ourselves and squeezing into the lift cage. A bell rings and slowly, at one metre per second, we float down into the depths of the earth. We’re all wearing blue plastic helmets. They’re equipped with torches that are fastened to a cable with the belt around your waist. During the journey underground, I think about what could have motivated people more than 50 years ago, to drill a 260-metre-deep hole in the earth? Because what we are doing is nothing other than following a widened, enlarged borehole into the deep. There’s …

Fernando Pessoa wrote about it, the Salt Museum revitalises it Until just a few years ago, Portugal was one of the countries with the largest artisan salt production sectors and inclusively ensuring the history of the Atlantic coastline of the Iberian Peninsula featured in the most famous dish of the Roman Empire, Iberian Garum, made from the marine salt extracted at salt works along the extent of what would become the Portuguese coastline. As from the mid-1970s, there began a decline in Portuguese salt production that would go into freefall as from the 1990s and certainly interlinked with the country’s …