Wednesday 2 December 2009

White gold in the south of France



This is an unused card, bought 2009.  It isn't, I think, a commercially produced card because it has none of the normal postcard markings on the back, just an email address on the front.  If it weren't for the fact that I know where it was bought, I would have little idea of what it shows.

The clue of its whereabouts lies in the narrow, almost silhouette-like, photo of city walls crossing the middle of the card.  It is a less reddish colour and less like a fairy-tale city than Carcassonne but there are similarities.  It is Aigues Mortes in the Petit Camargue in the south of France.  The picture above is of Le Saunier de Camargue, producers of salt, and the pictures below are details from the area.

They produce something like 500,000 tons of salt every year, by evaporation of the salt water which has been pumped into lagoons.  The process has been around since ancient times: salt has always commanded a price because of its ability to preserve food.  It could be considered to be one of the foundations of civilisation.  In more modern times, the needs of the chemical industry have increased the demand.

The salt works are in the midst of a very important wetland ecosystem, and the company is committed to maintaining it because the quality of the salt depends on the quality of the surrounding environment.

One final and interesting fact about salt, "la gabelle" was the tax on salt whereby everyone in France over the age of eight had to buy a certain amount of salt every week, at a price fixed by the state monopoly.  This caused the development of salt smuggling because widely different taxes were levied in different parts of the country.  The tax was not abolished until 1790, just after the start of the French Revolution.


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4 comments:

  1. That's just fascinating. Thank you for the explanation of the postcard. Marvelous post! I liked it alot.

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's a lot of salt. And an interesting history of taxation and smuggling. :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hello Sheila,
    Well, the Festival of Postcards (6th Ed.)White is finally online and it has been published here:
    http://wp.me/pp92w-77c
    Unfortunately - for technical reasons - I was forced to divide the festival into two posts. The link to the second section is at the foot of the first post.
    Sorry for the inconvenience,
    Evelyn in Montreal

    ReplyDelete

Welcome to my postcard collection! I love hearing what you think of the cards - but spam WILL be deleted.

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