We are now at a wetland of international importance, declared a natural park in 1986 for its beautiful landscape and wildlife, where you can appreciate the connection between the salt industry, and the park’s fauna and flora.
The salicornia is the typical flora that adapts itself to the saline environment through two systems: by being saltier than its own environment and by eliminating salt.
The Park’s most famous inhabitants are pink flamingos. In one year one can observe more than 300 bird species, the flamingos standing out due to their bright colours and beauty. As it happens in cities, there are residents and migrants. Ones make the North route, passing through the Delta del Ebro, the French Camargue, North of Italy, Croatia, and reaching Turkey. Others make the South route via Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt.
They eat artemia salina, a tiny crustacean that gives them their pink colour. Flamingos do a continuous dance with their legs so as to lift the mud from the sea bed. They stick their heads down and sift through the mud with their beaks in order to find the small crustacean, only half a centimetre big. An egg from artemia can remain for 10 years in a saline medium until the conditions are right for hatching. Flamingos breed in the Park, some years 500 chicks are born.
The Salt Museum is located in what used to be a salt mill, within the Murtula Salt Mines. The museum is a didactic centre, well deserving a visit. On the second floor there is an Observatory with a telescope watch the birds of the salt mines.
From the Tamarit Watch Tower you can see what are, no doubt, some of the world’s most breath-taking sunsets.
