The Valsalobre saltworks

Salt for the flocks

In the valley of Valsalobre there were saltworks until 1982. Villagers who remember them link the village’s name to them: to them, a valley with salt. It is not a verified etymology, but it shows how important salt was in the place’s memory.

The salt came from a well. In earlier times, one villager recalls, the water was raised by a waterwheel driven by a female donkey and poured into a pond; later it was pumped with an electric motor. From there it passed to the albercas, the evaporation pans. People who have had to dig a well in the valley say that below the level of the fresh water, the water that comes out is always salty. Holes made by cows licking the salt deposits remain in a house wall, and pigeons still visit a brackish spring beside the road.

How it was extracted

The albercas were shallow pans lined with wood and stone slabs. Iron was no use, because the salt damaged it, and neither was cement; wood, by contrast, was protected by it. In mid-June they were washed and filled with water. Depending on the weather, salt was harvested in July, August and September, usually once a week.

They had to watch the sky. If it rained, the fresh water had to evaporate before salt began to form, and a saca, a harvest, was lost. One salt worker remembers that July and August storms used to be almost daily and that now, with drier summers, the saltworks would have yielded excellent harvests. When it went well, the salt set in sheets in the pans, and those who saw them working speak of how beautiful it was.

The salt was gathered with wooden rakes. It was piled in the walkways between pans to drain. The finest was swept with baleos, brooms made with stems from the hills. It was stored in a building and gradually piled up. The grandfather of the family that ran it was also a carpenter: he made windows, doors, wheelbarrow wheels, even coffins. The saltworks was a business of several trades.

Who bought it

Stockbreeders from the surrounding villages bought it. They came with pack animals, and the pegs where they tied their mules while loading the sacks can still be seen in a wall. One interviewee recalls, from memory and without exact figures, about four thousand sheep in Valsalobre and many more in Villanueva, Carrascosa, Peñalén and Tragacete. In the final years, a stockbreeder might send a message with the postman: ten sacks to be filled, which he would collect later.

It was sold in a wooden measure, levelled off, with a little extra given free. Wheelbarrow loads were counted with marks on a stone column, one per load and a cross every ten: that was how they knew who had worked most.

Salt was essential for livestock. One shepherd explains it this way: when he went down to Córdoba with five hundred sheep, walking for a month, they did not need it there; two days after returning to the mountains they wanted salt again. The mountain pastures lacked sodium. Salt was put out for the sheep on stone slabs in fixed places, every three or four days. And each matanza, the annual pig slaughter, used between one and two arrobas to cure the hams.

The end, in 1982

The last salt worker dates the closure to 1982. It was the year he was leaving for military service, and his father said he no longer felt able to carry on alone. But there was another reason beneath it: the villages had fewer and fewer livestock, sea salt was cheaper and salt blocks to hang on the animals began to arrive. Only the sheep, which did not lick stones, still needed loose salt.

Today the store building has collapsed and the memory remains. Another villager, who saw the saltworks in operation as a child, says that it sparked his interest in carpentry and that he later made windows even in Germany. For the interviewees, declining livestock numbers and the abandonment of the hills go together, as they explain in The hills provide a living.