Yes, I'm fond of salt. From the sea, in the sea or into meal preparation, I like the salt. We were driving around Mallorca yesterday and I was navigating from the back seat. I'll post more pictures of our trip soon but basically this place is pretty dry. Much of the countryside ground is a very dry and rocky and it must be hard to grow anything. We saw a lot of dry riverbeds and the only bodies of water we saw were man-made reservoirs high in the mountains. Crops were growing only where some form of irrigation in place.
In the Southeast corner of the island there was a little blueish spot marked "wetlands". I doubted very much that they were the kind of wetlands that we know of in Florida. I navigated us to go check them out because I suspected something even better. Sure enough, where the map said there would be wetlands we began to see glimmers of sunlight reflecting off slivers of water. I kept my eyes peeled and soon enough I found my target. It looked like big piles of snow over by the wetlands. We pulled into the Salines d'Es Trenc salt plant.
The wetlands were indeed wetlands, but it was a well managed flow of seawater. The seawater was gradually flowed from field to field and more and more of it evaporated. The gradual evaporation and movement of higher and higher concentrated water into different zones enabled workers to harvest the salt from the sea. In the plant they cleaned it and refined it for human consumption.
The plant had a nice little gift shop that sold very expensive salt samples and other salty-themed goods. Of course I got swept up into the whole salt-buying frenzy around us. I selected a fine little can of "gourmet" salt for 10 Euro and was milling around the check-out line when my good friend Charlie used some subtle verbal judo to slap me upside the head. His comment was something like "Gosh, they should at least put a tarp over the big piles of salt out back if they are going to charge that much for a handful."
After a moment of hesitation followed by clarity I set the can back on the shelf. I decided that whatever they were selling out in the vending machine would be just great. Not to mention that I have never bought anything in a salt vending machine before. Come to think of it, I've never seen a salt vending machine before. So I got a couple Euro from Charlie and ended up getting a free kilo of salt, fresh from the sea!
