Paisajes de la sal en Andalucía

Abstract

Salt works create unique landscapes with both natural and environmental values, due to their cultural, historical and social background, as well as their heritage and identity. The energy and natural circumstances: sun, wind, gravity and relative humidity, facilitate an essential strategy for their operation: evaporation, which emphasizes as decisive their geographical location in the territory and their dependence on seasonal weather cycles, hydrological regime, geological underground structure, geomorphology and human action to enhance the efficiency of production processes. Nowadays they are mostly abandoned and in ruins, leaving the cultural, historical and economic significance, they used to have in the past, forgotten. These facts show the urgent procedure for the appreciation and recognition of these cultural surroundings as a common heritage of immediate social use, so that they become subject to specific management in order to prevent its disappearance.