Salt Road

A Salt Road (French: Route du Sel) is any of the prehistoric and historical trade routes by which essential salt has been transported to regions that lacked it (see History of salt).

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From the Bronze Age (in the 2nd millennium BC) fixed transhumance routes appeared, like the Ligurian drailles that linked the maritime Liguria with the alpages, long before any purposely-constructed roadways formed the overland routes by which salt-rich provinces supplied salt-starved ones.

The salt highways were the navigable rivers of Europe, where by medieval times shipments of salt coming upstream passed rafts and log-trains of timber, which could only be shipped downstream.^[1] And even along Europe's coasts, once long-distance trade was revived in the 11th century, the hot and sunny south naturally outproduced the wet north. By the Late Middle Ages the expanding fishing fleets of the Low Countries required more salt than could be produced locally; the balance was made up with salt from the Iberian Peninsula: "The United Provinces could have been brought to their knees if their supplies of salt had been blocked at the end of the sixteenth century. Spain did no more than dream of this," Fernand Braudel has written.^[2] In Ming China, salt as well as rice was shipped from south to north, along the Imperial Canal as far as Beijing.

Ports were not necessarily supplied with local salt. The Old Salt Route, about 100 km long (62 miles), linked Lüneburg with the port of Lübeck (both in Germany), which required more salt than it could produce; Lüneburg, first mentioned in the 10th century, grew rich on the salterns surrounding the town. Via Lauenburg the salt was shipped to Lübeck and from there supplied all the coasts of the Baltic Sea, least salty of the world's seas. Lüneburg and its salt were major factors of power and wealth of the Hanseatic League. After a long period of prosperity, its importance declined after 1600. The last of the salt mines was closed in 1980, ending the thousand-year tradition.

The vast interior of Poland was salt-starved, its maritime districts lying under rainy skies and fronting the Baltic Sea. By medieval times the process of mining for fossil salt supplemented the age-old techniques of evaporating sea salt in tidal pans. By the 14th century, at Wieliczka near Kraków, Braudel reports that peasant extraction of salt from brine evaporated in large shallow iron pans had been eliminated by the early industrialisation of salt mining. "Galleries and shafts were now dug to a depth of 300 metres, and enormous winches powered by teams of horses brought blocks of salt to the surface. At its peak, production stood at 40,000 tons a yearand the mines employed 3000 workers. By 1368, the cooperation of the Polish state had been obtained."^[3]

Of the early modern period in Europe, Fernand Braudel remarked that in spite of the flux and reflux of economics,

"no salt mine was ever abandoned and the scale of the equipment needed put these mines in the hands of merchants from very early days. Salt-marshes on the other hand, were exploited by artisanal methods: the merchants took control only of transport and marketing, both in Setúbal in Portugal and in Peccais in Languedoc. Salt marketing was probably quite big business along the Atlantic seabord^[4] or the Rhône valley."^[5]

In other parts, the salt route was longer than a portage between navigable streams. Salt unloaded at the ports of Nice and Ventimiglia could travel by two salt roads leading away from the coastal area, from Nice up the Vésubie valley, via Saint-Martin-Vésubie at the head of the valley, or from Ventimiglia inland through the Roya valley, over the Col de Tende pass and into Piedmont.

In France, from 1984 to 2006 a hiking group called La Route du Sel^[7] gathered each July to travel various salt roads in the Hérault, Gard and Aveyron départements of Southern France.

See also

• Via Salaria

Notes