Salinera Española has fished the salt harvest from the ponds of the Natural Park of ses Salines de Ibiza this week with a total of 56,000 tons, 7.7% more than last year. And it could have been around 60,000 tonnes, a figure that has not been reached for years, if some 3,000 had not been lost as a result of the repeated and intense rains recorded this autumn, according to the calculations of the director of the salt company in Ibiza, José María Fernández .
“In the last month it has rained 16 days in ses Salines, something we have not found on our records for the last 25 years. It has caused a small disaster,” he says, referring, above all, to the fact that the rainfall “greatly hinders the work of harvesting” and “destroys the tracks, which will have to be repaired”.
The biggest problem of the rains on production is generated at the beginning of the harvest, between September and October, when the ponds are emptied. In this sense, Fernandez explains that in September and October “it didn’t rain at all”. “We thought we were going to escape, but it always rains.” Rainfall in early November caused the loss of “half” of the salt in some ponds that had just been emptied, according to Fernandez. In any case, this year’s production has been “good” because “it has not been wet, except in late autumn”.
The company’s objective is always at least to surpass the 50,000 tonne barrier, the quantity that marks whether the harvest is profitable. “From this figure onwards, we get our heads up and breathe because at least we can cover the costs”, says the director of the salt farm.
Today’s harvests have nothing to do with those produced at the beginning of the last century, when up to 90,000 tons of salt could be extracted from the ponds in a year, almost twice as much as today.
As this newspaper published in mid-September, just as the harvest began, Fernández estimated that this year’s harvest would be 50,000 tonnes, but in the end expectations have been exceeded.
For the full article, please visit Diario de Ibiza website here.