Interviews
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In conversation with Maria do Céu
She took over her father’s salt pan at 61. Priya Raman asks what changed, and what never will.
Maria do Céu took over her father’s salt pan in Olhão when she was sixty-one, after a career as a primary school teacher. Six summers later she is one of the most respected producers on the coast. We talked on a bench beside the pans, in the shade of a fig tree she planted the year she started.
Why salt, and why so late?
“Because nobody else in the family wanted it. My brothers went to Lisbon, my children went to London. I thought: if I don’t do it, the pan becomes a car park. So I did it.”
What surprised you?
“How much of it is discipline. People think it’s poetic, the sun and the sea. It is. But mostly it is coming every single day, in the heat, to do the same small things.”
“The pans don’t care who you are. They care if you come every day.”
About the writer
Priya Raman
Priya interviews cooks, farmers and grandmothers for the magazine’s Interviews section and records an audio version of each conversation.
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