Salt Pans

The water in them runs pink, from the brine shrimp that live in water too salty for anything else, and the finished salt is piled in white hills beside the pier.

The Dutch West India Company started producing here in the seventeenth century, worked by enslaved people who lived in the huts still standing along the road. Production stopped after abolition in 1863 because it was no longer profitable without them, and only resumed in 1966 when Cargill mechanised it. The company now produces around four hundred million kilos a year — more than the whole colonial period together.

Drive it in the late afternoon when the pink is strongest and the salt hills catch the low sun. Nothing is charged and nothing is sold; there is no shade for the entire stretch. An hour for the drive, half a day with the slave huts, the flamingos and the lighthouse.