Manzanillo
Expatriates living in San Miguel de Allende are a tender lot. We're sunshine babies. When the climate gets too tough for us, there's only one rational thing to do.
We head for the beach.
Paul (El Guapo) invited me to accompany him for a few days at a friend's beach house near Manzanillo. Ah, a few days of lying on the beach, swimming in warm waters, reading a good novel: just what I needed to beat the rainy day blues.
Of course, I never do any of that stuff. Promise of idyllic days under swaying palms isn't enough to get me to make the trip. But Paul told me that nearby we could visit the Salt Museum of Cuyutlán. No way I could refuse that.
That Paul. He really knows how to hook me.
We set out to find the place. In the car I told Paul I had forgotten to bring my laptop with downloaded directions for getting there. Paul said, "Don't worry about it. I know right where it is."
I know better than to accept such assurances, but I didn't want to drive back to the house. So I yielded to sloth over sensibility and placed my trust in Paul's legendary navigation skills.
Soon we were driving south, following the eastern shore of the Cuyutlán Lagoon, a shallow salt lake many miles in length.
A tiny settlement of shacks roofed with palm thatch caught my eye. I yelled "Paul!" (Paul was driving. Note to self: avoid riding with drivers who exhibit signs of advanced ADD.) "Paul! Stop! Right here!"
Paul rolled his eyes as he does when I use my imperious tone, and pulled to the side of the road.
We had stumbled across a salt-works. A gang of men have removed a black plastic tarp from a large heap of sea salt. They are shoveling it into the lower end of a motor-driven screw, filling large bags from the stream of now clump-free salt issuing from the upper end.
Backbreaking work, this. The temperature is around 100º and the humidity is near 100%. Small but tough men haul filled bags away, to be sealed closed and loaded onto a truck headed for Aguascalientes, whose epicurean residents provide demand for hand-harvested sea salt. This is the world-famous Sal Coronita (Coronet brand salt).
Salt is produced from the brackish waters of Cuyutlán Lagoon in crude evaporation pans, using methods virtually unchanged since the Sixteenth Century, when it was used in the refining of silver ore. The colonial owners of salt works made great fortunes rivaling those of the silver magnates, since they did not have to share a portion of their output with the Spanish Crown.
At the end of the dry season, all that remains in the evaporation pans is crystalline salt. Then rains come, refilling the pans. Salt crystals rise to the surface. Men use boards affixed to poles (more recently, they use plastic brushes) to scrape up the floating salt that they then carry over to large, tarpaulin-covered piles to await shipment.
For their hard labor, the salineros (salt workers) earn $1,000 pesos ($100 U. S.) per week, a good wage in these parts.
Some of the salineros live in the nearby pueblo of San Buenaventura with their wives and children, traveling to the salt works by bus, pickup truck, or by riding their bicycles along the shoulderless highway.
Some live part-time in tumble-down dormitories, sleeping in hammocks, cooking their meals over open fires.
The image below depicts in toto the sanitary facilities for some twenty men. No door, no roof.
A glimpse through the window of a dormitory room reveals laundry hanging to dry. No matter how humble their lodgings, people in this country are fastidious about personal cleanliness.
Roadside stand operators sell small bags of hand-harvested sea salt—here Sal Espuma de Mar; a name that might be translated "Spindrift Salt." Twenty-five pesos for a one-kilogram a bag.
It's good stuff. I sprinkled some of the coarse salt on my lunch today.
I went to the effort to photograph the small bags, but I didn't think to buy any until I got back to the beach house. Looks like Paul isn't the only one around here whose wits are not always with him.
Oh—and the Salt Museum? We never did find it.