OLHÃO, Portugal: In the early 1990s, João Navalho, a microbiologist fresh out of graduate school, came to the salt marshes in
the Algarve region with a handful of young partners to grow and harvest microalgae. Their dream was to market the algae's beta carotene as natural orange dye for the fast-growing organic food market.
The business foundered; the 37 acres of marshes, known as salinas, became a garbage dump for residents in this pocket of southwestern Portugal who did not know what else to do with their outmoded kitchen appliances. After years of frustrated effort, the partners suddenly changed course.
"We looked around and said, we're stupid!" Navalho recalled. "We have a lot of land here. What we should do with the salinas is produce salt!"
They asked the longtime locals for someone who might remember how to harvest salt the old way: by hand, as it was done here before industrialization made it cheap and plentiful, and small salt works fell into desuetude.
Like everything else in this undertaking, the answer was staring them in the face. Living on the edge of the marshes was Maximino António Guerreiro, a sunburned retired salt worker with a grizzled beard and missing teeth, who started harvesting here with his father more than four decades ago.
In 1997, the salt project began. Guerreiro cleaned out and rebuilt the long-abandoned patchwork of rectangular, clay-lined salt beds. With young workers from Eastern Europe, he opened sluices from the sea and set up a system of dams to control the water flow. He shared the secrets of salt: how to measure evaporation levels and determine the correct salt density and water temperature, when to add water and when to rake and skim.
"I had to quit school when I was 14 to help my father make salt every day, and then the work disappeared," said Guerreiro, 56. "Now we're back — making the most beautiful white salt in the world."
The financing was difficult, Navalho said. "When we told the banks we wanted to make salt, they said that everyone had gone out of the business," he said. "So we promised if we didn't pay back they could take our necks."
Two years later, Necton, the salt company Navalho created here, produced its first salt crop. Now it is one of the region's new salt pioneers, struggling to revive what was once a flourishing trade in this part of Portugal. They are trying to convince consumers of the health and taste benefits of handmade, non-industrial salt and to compete in an increasingly sophisticated global salt market.
"Life begins in the ocean," Navalho said. "What we are selling is ocean saltwater without the water. Call it sea dust."
To many people, salt is salt. But to those for whom it is a gourmet condiment, few varieties compare to the crème de la crème of salt known as fleur de sel, harvested by gently skimming the white, lacy film from the surface of salty beds when weather conditions in summer allow.
Necton produces both traditional hand-harvested salt as well as a gourmet version, known here as flor de sal.
The history of Portugal and salt is long and romantic. The first known document related to Portuguese salt works dates from the 10th century, when a countess donated salt marshes to a monastery that she founded. A century later, the Algarve region was shipping salt across Europe; in the 15th and 16th centuries, salt helped make Portugal a global power. In one of his best-known works, the 20th century poet Fernando Pessoa, wrote, "Oh salty sea, so much of your salt is tears of Portugal."
But Navalho confesses that his team learned many of its techniques from Guérande, the Brittany-based cooperative that restored traditional salt-making to France in the 1970s and whose brand dominates the hand-harvested salt business. France produces about 80 percent of Europe's hand-harvested salt and fleur de sel.
Unlike French salt, which has a grayish hue, the Portuguese is a pure, shiny white. In France, rain churns up charcoal-gray mud from the bottom of the salt pans and leaves behind a grey residue, while Portuguese summers tend to be sunny and dry.
These days, European designer salt must compete with exotic salts from around the world, including Himalayan pink salt harvested at altitudes over 10,000 feet, a South Korean salt that is roasted in bamboo, and Hawaiian red Alaea, which gets its color from red clay.
There have also been reports of counterfeit hand-harvested salt. Nico Boer, the German co-manager of the Marisol salt works in nearby Tavira, said one Portuguese salt producer sold more than a dozen tons of industrial salt to the French several years ago, passing it off as hand-harvested.
"It's a tough business," he said.
The operations at Marisol and Necton are set on protected national land. At Necton, salt mountains sit in the open air, protected by black tarps. Women wearing hairnets and rubber gloves sift through the shiny salt as it flows along an assembly line, picking out bits of insects' wings, brine shrimp and wood chips.
But Necton has bigger plans. Navalho has begun to cultivate an exotic salad vegetable called salicorne, which is in fact a small weed with fleshy, tart, dark-green branches. He hopes to build a bird sanctuary for the flamingos, egrets, plovers and other wild birds here. He is trying to draw summer visitors for tours of both the salts works and the little algae-growing he still does.
And Navalho, who was born in Mozambique, wants to expand operations to the eastern coast of Africa, to restore some of the abandoned salt fields built by the Portuguese 300 years ago.
First, however, he has to persuade customers to think about salt differently.
"People might like to drive a Ferrari, but they can't afford it," he said. "But they can afford the best salt in the world. I want people to stop asking, 'How much does it cost?' and start asking, 'Where can I buy it?' "
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