Joao Navalho was born in Mozambique in 1965 of Portuguese parents and moved to Lisbon as a child. He earned his degree in marine biology and a graduate degree in aquaculture at Algarve University. He and Vitor Verdelho, a friend at the Biotechnology College of the Catholic University in Oporto, applied for and received a grant to look for a new way to use Portugal's natural resources as a way of differentiating Portugal from the rest of Europe. Portugal needed to take advantage of the Algarve's sun and sea beyond the bargain-rate tourism for planeloads of German and English visitors who contributed little good to the environment, let alone the big hotels and developments built speedily and carelessly to house them.
The students thought they could use new technology to make large quantities of algae that produce beta-carotene, which is valuable to food producers seeking a healthful, non-chemical alternative orange dye. In 1994 they began looking for a part of Portugal with maximal sunlight and plentiful clean seawater, for the fastest algae production. After several years of searching, they found the perfect spot: 12 hectares of salt marshes in the protected National Park of Ria Formosa, in the tidal flats just a few kilometers from the tourist centers of Olhao and Faro. Seville is just 150 kilometers away, and Lisbon 300. The constant flow of seawater, free of polluting effluents from the industries that mar much of the Atlantic coastline, and the constantly beating sun would be ideal for the cutting-edge technology they planned to install.
In 1997, the students formed a company separate from the university called Necton. A few grants and their own educations would be their capital, and they would run the company on socialist ideals: all workers, whatever their position, would be majority stockholders and share profits. Then something got in the way of their progressive plans, something no idealistic marine biologist could ignore. That something was the ancient history of their carefully selected site as one of the world's primary producers of a product man can't live without - salt.

A wetland covered with flamingos - or a desert
The Egyptians were probably the first civilization to methodically evaporate seawater to extract salt, and the Phoenicians probably brought their early technology to the Portuguese Atlantic coast. The presence of Roman ruins in the Algarve suggests that they produced salt there, as they did on much of the coastline. Certainly by the year 1000 the Algarve was sending salt to the rest of Europe, and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Age of Exploration, salt helped Portugal consolidate its position as a world power. A payment of salt enabled the Portuguese to regain Brazil from the Dutch.
But the countries of northern and eastern Europe learned to mine rock salt in caves, and in the mid-twentieth century mechanization in the mines and cheap transport and better roads across the Continent made sea salt relatively expensive. Mechanization arrived for the production and harvest of sea salt, too, including in the Algarve. After the Second World War the marenotos - tenders of salinas, or salt pans - found they couldn't withstand price competition from dirt-cheap rock salt, and abandoned their work to find jobs in factories and cities. Portuguese sea salt, even if mechanically harvested, maintained its high reputation: large conglomerates sell Portuguese sea salt to the French, for table use, and ship inferior salt back to Portugal. But the small salt pans that had kept local economies and agricultural artisans alive vanished.
Navalho and his co-workers were puzzled and upset to see small salt pans on their own and adjoining property abandoned to become communal dumping grounds. Private land ownership is allowed within the large national park, as long as it is for non-polluting agricultural use. But the only businesses they saw around them were standard fish farms and huge salt pans that computers could regulate with almost no help from workmen and that machines could harvest once a year. The rest - the honeycomb of small rectangular salt pans that followed the sluices of the intertidal shores, where sea water to fill the pans was most easily available - were falling out of use.


The ecosystem that network enabled was vanishing too. 'The place was like a desert,' Navalho, a perpetually energetic figure, says to visitors to Necton. 'I like to see flamingos and birds. If you don't fill the pans with water every year and you're not taking care of them every day, they'll be dirty, dry and ugly. And the birds - not just flamingos, but avocets, plovers, egrets, dozens of others - will be gone.'
The new collaborators faced an urgent, and very large, change of plan. Their first commitment was to the environment, and that meant keeping the wetlands wet. One marenoto, Maximino Guerreiro, was already taking care of the industrial-size salt pan on Necton's property. He warned the new owners that they had to take care of the smaller pans, too, if they didn't want to watch them turn into dumps like the ones they saw on their morning rides to work. Besides, he said, the salt from the smaller salinas - harvested several times over the summer rather than once at the end, ahead of the fall rains - tasted ever so much better and was much healthier too. But Necton had better act quickly. Men like him - born with the knowledge of how to fill the pans in the spring and, when enough water had evaporated and crystals had formed, to harvest the salt with wooden rakes - were dying out. The tools were being left to rot. He could find the tools. He could show them how it was done.To take Guerreiro up on his offer, the men found another collaborator: Yago Del Valle Inclan, an industrial engineer who had also worked in aquaculture in and around on the southern Spanish coastline, just over the border. Valle Inclan, who had been born in Galicia and raised in Barcelona (and is the grandson of a well-known Spanish writer, who invented the name), preferred country life to the 'stress' of the city, and had worked on a shrimp farm in a salt marsh; he was ready to follow even slower rhythms and apply his modern knowledge to old techniques. Valle Inclan arrived in the late fall of 1997, the time when salt harvesters take a long breath before preparing the salt pans for the next spring. He spent long hours and days with Guerreiro learning about water levels from month to month during the salt season, how to judge evaporation, how to look at salt crystals and know when to rake the salt. He told Guerreiro about algae, and the basis of the food chain and saltwater wetland ecology: tiny artemia brine shrimp, which survive in saltier water than any of their relatives and natural predators, and breed in startling numbers once the salt reaches a certain level, giving large quantities of food to the birds that thrive on them.
The men found and repaired tools and cleaned out the clay-bottomed salt pans. They cleared the channels of water that would use gravity and tides to replenish the salt pans. Through the spring and summer of 1998 they tended the pans, with the help of a few young men Guerreiro trained during the busy times - the salt harvest, which happens every five to seven weeks depending on the heat of the sun and the force of the drying north winds. At the end of the summer Necton had a crop of dazzlingly white salt.
The young directors were thrilled. They had made a magnificent product. Then they tried to sell it, and quickly realized why they saw so much trash instead of salt on their way to and from work.

'Regards, c'est blanc!'
According to Portuguese law, Necton can't even sell its salt for the table, let alone get anything like a fair price for it. In 1973 the government set new standards defining three categories of salt. The highest was pure sodium chloride - what industry wants, as a primary ingredient for glass, paints, batteries, explosives, and glues; plastics makers need chloride for PVC, the polymer in plastic wrap and many other products. It is also the salt most people buy for the table. Additives such as iodine and fluoride are allowed for table salt, and potassium cyanide and aluminum silicate as anti-caking agents, to prevent the refined salt from turning to stone. The second category is 96 percent sodium chloride, and the third is below 96 percent sodium chloride--fit only for trucks to dump onto the road, not for the table (the world's chief use of salt is to prevent freezing).
Necton's salt fell into this third category. Hand-harvested, sun-dried sea salt has a far greater variety of mineral salts than plain, purified sodium chloride, some of them in high quantity, like magnesium, iron, and calcium. It also contains many micronutrients that get washed out of mechanical salt along with all the other impurities that machines introduce. This makes traditional sea salt far better for the health of anyone who eats it, besides having a whole world more flavor. But as far as Portuguese authorities were concerned, all unwashed, unpurified sea salt is unfit for human consumption. The best Necton could do that first year was to sell its salt at the same price of the mechanically harvested crop from the one large salt pan would fetch - even if the hand-harvested salt required ten times as much labor.
Frustrated, the young partners sent Valle Inclan to visit the co-operative at Guerande, in France on the Atlantic coast, which since its founding in 1975 had made fleur de sel a legend in the gourmet world - an exceedingly expensive legend. Fleur de sel is the cream of the salt pan - the newly formed crystals that float on the surface before becoming big and heavy enough to fall to the bottom. They must be harvested quickly, within hours of forming, before they fall. Although the content and health benefits of fleur de sel and traditional sea salt are identical, what's different is the texture: fleur de sel crumbles at a touch and melts on the tongue.
Valle Inclan learned a great deal about methods for harvesting from his French hosts, and came back convinced that the Necton partners were sitting on a gold mine. His conviction was based on what inspired the exclamation of the head of Guerande when he first saw a basket of fleur de sel at Necton: 'Regards, c'est blanc!'

Portugal has many advantages to the Brittany coast where the French harvest their own premium salt. Rain stirs up the salt crystals in the salt pan, which as they become more numerous precipitate to the clay bottom of the shallow pan. The sun that brought the young marine biologists to the Algarve is far more reliable than on the north coast of France, where workers must harvest salt even after rainfalls. The elegant-sounding sel gris of Brittany gets its gray color from the clay that gets raked along with the salt crystals--mud, to put it bluntly. Necton decided from the first to leave the bottom layer of the pans untouched by the workers wielding wooden rakes, resulting in a white so pure that the long pyramid-shaped piles of salt during each harvest look like miniature peaks of the Alps or Pyrenees in the blinding height of a winter's day. It's a disorienting image in the relentless heat of the Algarve summer.
French fleur de sel was whiter than its sel gris, or traditional sea salt. But Necton's flor de sal was whiter still. And still illegal.
Necton found a way around its status problems with the guidance of the Reserva Natural de Castro Marim, a reserve in the Algarve where another producer was still producing traditional sea salt. A technician at the reserve named Anabela Resende had helped bring together a few marenotos who wanted to harvest sea salt by hand to form a producer's association, TradiSal. which Necton joined in 1999, bringing the total to ten members. Resende knew of a certification that the chief organic-food group in France, Nature et Progres, granted to unrefined sea salt - probably the only such certification in the world given for salt, in fact. It guarantees that the salt has been tested for and found free of 82 possible contaminants, including pesticides, radioactivity, various bacteria, and the heavy metals that often appear in trace quantities in industrial salt, because of the machinery that rolls across salt beds. The group requires producers to work in protected areas where industry and hunting are forbidden, and that they sun-dry and do not grind their salt. Winning this certification, which several TradiSal producers did in 2000, has the extra benefit for Necton of demonstrating that the algae it plans to sell is produced in a pure environment.
But it won't change the antiquated Portuguese law. TradiSal is petitioning the government to exclude two categories from the restrictions of the infamous third class: traditional sea salt and flor de sal. It also wants to create an internationally recognized logo that will appear on each bag of either kind of salt, and to create a market that will appreciate - and pay for - it.

Slow Food Award motivations
The knowledge of how to care for small salinas - a whole language of terms for tools, the cycle of tending and cleaning and harvesting - is being lost with the marenotos, whose children have of necessity looked to other work. With the salt pans goes a fragile ecosystem, a rare instance of the survival in a highly populated region of the world's most productive ecosystem after rain forests. 'We're in a reserve, and it's very hard to build,' Navalho says. 'But if you have money and know the right people, you can. If we don't take care of our salinas and our neighbors' salinas, we'll have buildings there. For sure. People here don't care about biodiversity.'
The founders of the young company can't afford to sell their salt at such a large loss for much longer. 'We can't pay every year from our pocket, because of the beauty of the process and the idea,' Navalho says. Already Necton sells its traditional sea salt in bulk to France, where demand far outweighs its supply. EU laws allow any member country to sell whatever salt (or any other food product, for that matter) it wishes as long as the label says where it was packaged. Portuguese pure-white traditional salt -much more delicate and close to fleur de sel than virtually any sea salt now on the market--is barely known outside Portugal, and what little is available is likely to have a French label. And almost no one who appreciates fleur de sel and is willing to pay a royal sum for it knows that a beautiful and many would say superior version is being sold in Portugal at a fraction of the price.
'We don't want to be the salt kings,' Navalho says. Necton just wants to preserve an endangered tradition and the endangered environment that goes along with it, before turning back to its real work, making algae. So far TradiSal has explored ways to co-operate without being a full-fledged co-operative; there are no funds to pool together, and in fact no funds at all for the publicity and marketing that are essential to make flor de sal known. Navalho wants to avoid marketing colored and flavored salts, as other traditional producers have done. He dreams of being able to gather together young people to continue an ancient tradition - and earn enough to make them want to hand it down to their children.

Corby Kummer