The salt pans of Giraud: where nature resists the salt

The Giraud salt pans, in the Camargue, look like a world at the end of the world: a kind of post-apocalyptic environment where man has abandoned the land and nature is reclaiming its space. For centuries salt was used as a preservative thanks to its ability to wipe out every form of life. Here man, with channels and containment basins and thanks to a favourable orography, concentrated it for centuries. But producing salt in Europe is now ever more costly, and the Giraud salt pans have abandoned the splendour of the past. At first glance it seems that the work of man has destroyed every form of life; and yet, even in this inhospitable land, life survives.

The pink colour is due above all to a microscopic alga called Dunaliella salina (not visible to the naked eye), which has found a way to thrive in this hostile environment. The orange rivulets, due to a lower salt concentration, host another form of life: the Artemia salina, a tiny crustacean that feeds on those algae. It is precisely the Artemia, with its carotenoid pigment, that gives the characteristic pink to the flamingos that feed on it — I talk about it in the reportage Camargue, not only flamingos. Where the water turns purple, instead, the alga has no “enemies” and proliferates undisturbed.

Man has tried to give order and structure to the chaos of nature, sacrificing the environment of the Rhône delta, originally more varied. How much longer will these landscapes last? And in the end, will it be nature that takes the upper hand over the work of man?