Making a living in salt

From dawn till dusk you can always spot the silhouette of Nazzereno Darmanin, 76, against the skyline, tending to his salt pans in the south of Malta. He has been harvesting sea salt, every summer, for more than 50 years – perhaps more if you add up that as a baby, his mother used to bundle him up and take him with her to the pans. Mr Darmanin, tanned and weather-beaten, is now one of a mere handful of sea salt harvesters left in Malta. “My family has owned these salt pans for more than 200 years,” he said. Old documentation traces back these saltpans to 1820, but Mr Darmanin, believes that they are older than that. To this day he still pays an annual emphyteusis (ċens) equivalent to the cost of a Catholic mass. His ancestors never missed a beat in harvesting salt ever summer from June till the first rain in September, save for four years during the World War II. “The whole coast of Malta was fenced off due to army security,” he said. Each of the man-made pans, which used to be shaped by means of a pick-axe, has its own nickname: ‘Tat-Toqba’, ‘Taċ-Ċaghqa’, ‘Il-Ġdida’. ‘Il-Ġdida’ , which means ‘new’ in Maltese is probably something like a century old, but it would have been the...