The last salt rakers of Castro Marim

The pans at Castro Marim open at six, before the wind gets up. By seven the first crust of flor de sal is floating on the brine like frost on a window, and Rui Gonçalves, who is twenty-nine and the youngest raker on this stretch of the Guadiana, is already bent over it with a wooden skimmer that belonged to his grandmother.

There were more than two hundred families working these marshes in the 1960s. Today there are fourteen. Industrial salt from the Spanish side of the river is cheaper, whiter and arrives in plastic sacks; flor de sal is grey-pink, damp, uneven and sells to chefs in Lisbon and Copenhagen for forty times the price.

Waiting for the wind

Raking salt is mostly waiting. The water has to sit for weeks in a chain of shallow pans, each one saltier than the last, until the sun and the levante wind do the rest. Rain in July can ruin a season. A cloudy August can halve it.

Rui came back from a bank job in Faro three years ago. His father thinks he is mad; his grandmother, who still comes to the pans at dawn in a straw hat, thinks he is late. Between them they produce about four tonnes a year. All of it is sold before it is dry.