The Cape Verde Salt Flats, Sal
I went to the Cape Verde Islands nearly a year ago. Like most work-related trips it's still a blur of landscapes through truck windows and frozen expense claims. But this strange place at the centre of Sal - the dustiest, most misbegotten of all the islands in the archipelago - continues to plague me. It's an old working salt mine and pan and it lies at the centre of an ancient volcano at the top end of the island. It's an alien place that drags up extra-planetary descriptions - moonscape, martian; but for all that it's somehow hugely familiar, perhaps partly for its Hollywood theme-park otherness, but also for the fact that it's like some Ballardian reificiation of an ancient inner landscape....
The other great conjuring this landscape and its demented machinery performed was Kafka's In The Penal Colony: a nightmarish allegorical blend of bureaucracy, magic and torture carried out in just such a desolate place. As we wandered among these decrepit ingenious machines I could almost feel the weight of the Harrow, ready to carve its incantation into my skin, 'Be Just. Be Just.'
Sal, Cape Verde
Sal is a dry husk of an island; a floating desert created by the same weather patterns that scoured the Sahara out of mainland Africa. After a couple of hours of flying across the yawning mass of the Atlantic Ocean the very rawness of Sal’s scorched low blown surface is a shock - all low hills sculpted by parched gullies with the occasional tufting of acacias, gnarled and crouched, safely out of reach of the winds. Starved of stimuli, the eyes invent content: birds appear on the periphery - black against the smoky sky - disappearing at a turn of the head, lush coppices fill the horizon only to vanish with eye contact, phantoms created by a brain bewitched by so much emptiness.
The island got its name from its only product, salt, which used to be exported by the ton out to Brazil and the west coast of Africa: Senegal, the Belgian Congo. Out at Pedra de Lume, the remains of an extinct volcanic crater, lies the rotting evidence of this once burgeoning industry - a skeletal but still semi-functioning salt mine.
The salt flats
The journey to the mine took us through hapless Espargos, Sal’s capital, which looked forlorn under a sheet-grey sky, and the people gazing at us from open doorways seemed lost for something to do. The road out was rutted and uneven, the land falling away to the coast; we saw the occasional goat pawing at the drifting topsoil. Pedra de Lume village itself was unremarkable – a small settlement at the foot of the crater, a remnant of headier times. At the edges of the village stood the first of a long line of wooden mine workings: like ancient torture devices these creaking engineering marvels stretched up the slope of the volcano, inside of which lay the fabled salt lake. In the early to mid twentieth century this pulley-driven system was able to transport up to 25 tons of salt per hour, but due to falling demand this had all but ceased by 1985. Now despite a drive to get the process moving again, these strange constructions stand dry and useless, coated in a fine layer of salt and sand, moaning in the damp sea wind.
The machine
The inside of the crater itself is a remarkable prospect. You climb the outside of the volcano and enter through a narrow tunnel, the land dropping sharply away before shelving onto a wide plateau segmented into artificial salt paddies. From afar the whole thing looks almost achromatic but as you get closer extraordinary ranges of colour become apparent from deep blues to incandescent reds and pinks. There is also a stark difference in the levels of water which in places, noticeably the lake in the centre of the crater, is black and unfathomable, in others almost altogether absent, the ground a hard crust of crystallising salt. It is thought that the water here comes from deep in the earth as opposed to infiltrating laterally from the ocean, and from stepping into the crater lake this is wholly believable as beyond knee deep the water becomes bath-warm, the rapidly disappearing lake floor like a bed of hot coals; and because of it’s huge salt content, up to 40 times more than the nearby ocean, the buoyancy of the water is remarkable forcing you to simply lie back and be borne aloft, gazing at the sky.
The apparatus
The apparatus
The apparatus
From this vantage point, it is impossible not to feel cut off, isolated, both in the sense of being adrift in the middle of an extinct volcano and 500km away from the nearest landmass, but also from the colonial centres of Praia and Mindelo. Sal was the last of the Cape Verde Islands to be inhabited, and only then purely because of its salt industry (hence the name change from the bland but descriptive Plana, meaning flat, to the more mercantile Sal). With the slow winding down of this produce the island became almost forgotten but because of the international airport and its relative proximity to Europe, and of course its dazzling beaches, Sal is slowly coming to life and becoming a vital hub for Cape Verde’s mushrooming tourism industry. If any more evidence of this recasting as a playground for the rich of Europe was needed outside the massive and still growing construction industry on Sal (Praimar is like a ghost town in reverse with the sound of car engines and footfalls a future memory on its as yet unbuilt streets) and the ubiquitous cranes and the distant rumble of heavy machinery, the very fact that Pedra de Lume is currently being redeveloped as a golf resort (and this on an island with barely any natural water at all) is a stark pointer to Sal’s probable evolution
The lakes
The lakes