The Salt Flats of Salin de Giraud and the Camargue de Provence

I was bored last Sunday morning. My car had finally been repaired by a local atelier de carrosserie after a late-night crash at New Year and was sitting peacefully and intact outside among the pine trees. Did I have the confidence to go for a long drive?

No.

So I called a friend and we headed off to the Camargue in his car. One of the wonderful-fabulous-life-enhancing things about living in Provence is that more or less whatever countryside you want to get out into - barring glaciers and volcanic ash - is out there. Hills, mountains, sea, canals, garrigue, plains, vineyards, limestone caves, rivers are all within about an hour's drive. And the Camargue adds a unique wetland or marsh, stuffed with black bulls, white horses, pure-white egrets and pink flamingoes. Not forgetting the salt flats.

I've never found the lunar landscape of the saltflats terribly attractive but for some reason I decided they might be worth another look. I quickly packed up a picnic of a pain pavé, a large camembert, tomatoes, saucisson, rosé wine, ham, plus a hunting knife to cut everything up and we set off.

It was a warm sunny day (20th of Feb.) and the roads were clear down through Arles and into the Camargue. The marshy ground turns into salt flats or salins - saltworks - at Salin de Giraud and the sea water is kind of marshalled into shallow lakes by a system of old wooden locks with great metal nuts and screws that turn to let water in or keep it out.

There are huge hills of solid white salt along the coast with Mad-Max-style machinery, able to scale the salt and scrape it into containers I suppose. The machines are like angular insects, fragile-looking against the apparently lunar landscape. You can walk up to a viewing point and look out over these weird salt flats which appear blood red in certain light. On Sunday they were a wine red colour, looking in one direction, and glowed strangely yellow in another.

We left and went along to the long, very exposed beach nearby, to eat our picnic. The sun was strong and glancing off the Med right into our faces. A few couples were out walking their dogs, enjoying the February sunlight. Suddenly a couple on horseback arrived and hammered all the way down the beach, then returned. As they galloped, I saw the riders were two young women and they were obviously voltigeuses - acrobats who perform in circuses or other shows - as they swung themselves on and off their mounts, touching the sand then jumping back on, or balancing on one side of their horses with legs outstretched and an arm high in the air. One of the women performed a manoeuvre a bit like a handstand, and all this as the horses galloped hell for leather down the beach and back. It was beautiful to see.

For coffee, we went into Salin de Giraud. It's much more intriguing than I'd realised in the past. There are rows and rows of large terraces - identical houses which were built in the nineteenth century I'd say, for the workers in a local facory which used (and still uses) salt to make various household and industrial products. I guess originally the men also scratched up the salt from the salt flats - work now done by the stick-insect-y machines. I'll find out a bit more about the history though as it's not clear. I got talking to a young woman in the large bar/café there and she said that the houses were all built for factory workers not the saltworks. She was very young though and may not know the history. The bar/café itself was like a UK miners' welfare club - large, obviously built to take dozens of customers, with a long bar and - these days - a huge telly showing sport.

We walked around the village and it was interesting to see these rows and rows of homes, all identical. It showed very clearly that for the saltwork owners, or factory owners, the workers were just an undifferentiated bunch of Provencal guys. Not seen as individuals, there was no attemmpt to give them individual houses. Each house had a small identically-shaped shed in front of it and I guess that was for their tools. I had rather foolishly imagined that the salt flats' main purpose was to produce salt for people's dinner tables. Of course, most of the salt is used in the Alps, against the snow, and to produce industrial products. Only a tiny percentage ends up as refined salt to sprinkle in Provencal recipes.

There was also a large building from the same period which has been renovated but retains part of an entrance which still displays, almost obliterated, the words ecole ménagère. A school for maids. Presumably while the men were digging out salt or working in the factory their wives and daughters were learning to be maids, seamstresses, cooks and cleaners for the factory owner and managers. Certainly, on the edge of the village, by a pretty park, there are large houses with pleasant gardens which may once have belonged to the employers and foremen.

Returning home we decided to cross the Rhone by the little bac or ferry which takes a couple of minutes and costs 5 euros. The Rhone's not so wide here so I don't know why a bridge hasn't been built. It must be annoying for residents on the west side who need to cross every weekday for work in Istres, Martigues, Marseille or at Marignane airport. Or the petrol works in the Golfe de Fos. Again, I'm guessing but I think it may be to allow boats to pass to and from Port-St-Louis-du-Rhone. Otherwise, perhaps the guy making money from the bac is the local mayor's brother!

On the return journey we stopped for a while to look at the impossibly fragile flamants roses picking their way fastidiously through shallow water, dipping their curved beaks into the sea to fish out food. Some creatures just hark back to prehistory in their shape and form and flamingoes are among them. Cats feel very contemporary. So do sheep. They're animals man has manipulated and cross-bred for centuries. But tortoises, rhinos, elephants, lizards - they're creatures which are obviously as old as the hills and flamingoes have the same vibe. Their quirky movements, long curved necks and stick-thin legs seem to have evolved as slowly as the Camargue itself. As the sun set, they waded slowly into the distance, glowing pink, beaks bending to the water, legs making sharp angles to their feather-light bodies.

In the impressive terrain of Provence it was no surprise to see an immediate contrast in the heavy, solid black bulls which grazed nearby. Strange to think that these animals, so much more powerful than the flamingoes, are far more exploited. They're chased around the bull rings in Arles and end up in Intermarché, and then on Provençal dinner tables as saucisse served with aperitifs or as Gardianne de Taureau.

Yet even the flamingoes are used by the thrifty and industrious Provençaux, on cartes postales and to draw tourists. There is not much in Provence that isn't used to help people make a living. In the Camargue, from the black bulls to the pink flamingoes and from the white horses to the salt flats and the bac, pretty much everything is seen as a resource. Even the sand can be used to grow grapes. And the grapes are used for a light rosé wine which is perfect on a spring or summer's day whether you're sitting in a bar in Arles, watching voltigeuses on the beach or having a last look at the flamingoes as the sun goes down over the Camargue.

Time Travel: A Visit to the Archives in The Palais des Papes at Avignon

The Vaucluse here in Provence is an area, like many others I suppose, with a rich history when it comes to industry and agriculture.

When I first bought my home near L'Isle sur Sorgue, I realised there was a long history of olive cultivation on the land around the property. Everywhere in the surrounding pine forest there were young, untended olive trees that had struggled out of the roots and mattes of olive trees ruined by frost in the hard winter of 1956. The ruined olive trees are at even distances from each other and there are often straggly lavender plants nearby which, like the oliviers, have been wild for years. Presumably at some point after '56 the people growing olives and making olive oil left this hillside forest and abandoned their olive tree and lavender cultivation. But the story wasn't, and still isn't, clear to me.

The other part of the puzzle is that this is also an area which was quarried by Provencal people for centuries, for gypsum, to make plaster.

Near my house is an old gypse quarry which, like the olive groves, has been reclaimed by nature. Where local men once burned logs against the rocky quarry walls before scratching at powdered gypse to collect it, there are now just trees, song birds, wild flowers and mushrooms. And near the quarry is a small hamlet, the Hameau de la Parisienne, which once belonged to the quarry company or its workers and was rebuilt with incredible energy, and no formal knowledge of construction, by my (then-hippy) neighbours in the late 70s after it had fallen into ruin.

Now - I've tried to investigate this puzzle before without much success. It seems Provencal families have grown olive trees here for over 2000 years. The vast pine forest around my home, mixed with oak and other trees, grew up in recent decades. The land was once studded with healthy olive trees and pretty lavender bushes tended by people who - I assume - lived here rather than in the village and - I guess - kept sheep and goats and cats and dogs around them and carefully pruned their olive trees under the blue spring skies and collected their olives in winter just as I do with neighbours today. The wonderful exhibition at Arles in 2010 - Cesar - Le Rhone Pour Memoire had a map of ancient Provence which showed that people around here were busy growing olives and grapes 2000 years ago. (Not much change there then). A wonderful thrill ran down my spine when I saw that map in the Musée des Antiquités. It was in the room just next to the 2000 year old bust of a majestic Caesar (despite a chipped nose) which archaeologists had recovered from the Rhone riverbed along with hundreds of other Romans' possessions. On a spot more or less where my home is, there were quirky little drawings of grapes and olives, bringing home the sturdy continuity in human activity here since and before Roman times.

But. I've also read, in a book on the history of industry in the Vaucluse, that local people have 'quarried' gypse here for 9000 years, individual hands scraping it painstakingly out of the land to use in building.

So I wonder how, in recent times, in the 19th and 20th century, did the olive growers interact with the gypse quarriers? Were the olive growers put out of business by the killing frost in 1956? Did they just leave the area when irrigation made agriculture easier down on the plain by Isle sur Sorgue? Were olive growers families simultaneously involved in olive oil and gypse production? Or did the quarry company that eventually turned individual gypse and plaster production into a business in the 19th century somehow force the agricultural families out?

This week I went to the Archives at the Palais des Papes in Avignon to see if old documents would shed any light. It was an experience fairly typical of Provence - part charm, part beauty, part eccentricity.

If you know the Palais des Papes you may have seen the discreet little entrance to the Archives. You go up the stone steps towards the park and almost pass the door before you notice it. Inside, I climbed more steps and entered the ante-room to the Salle de Lecture. Apart from a couple of computer screens it was more or less Name of the Rose territory. A first-floor balcony runs round the room, packed with bookshelves and dusty books. Access is by a spiral staircase. The ceiling is made of huge old wooden beams. I was immediately conscious of my boots clicking loudly on the old traditional floor tiles. An ancient-looking archivist greeted me and asked what documents I was after. We had a long discussion about my topic... She then got me to fill out a long form, writing down most of what I'd already told her. Then she asked me to check the archive indexes and note the documents I wanted to read and gave me a crayon. "Thankyou" I said, pushing it back at her. "I've got a pen. I don't need a crayon". Gently, she pushed the crayon back at me. With a sweet smile she said: "It would be terrible if a pen leaked ink onto a unique historical record, don't you think?" I took the crayon.

I sat at the only table with the only other researcher. He was a very old man with wildly straggly white hair and a neatly clipped white beard. He sat in a wheelchair, gravely regarding a vast medieval book supported on one of those wooden book stands. It was hand-written, with dense writing and symbols and the pages were crumbling at the edges. I felt a bit envious - his book looked fascinating and I wanted to ask it was. Instead, I noted the documents I wanted to see and noticed he was glancing across at me. Then he leant forward and spoke in a calm voice: "You know it's nearly lunchtime?" he said. "You'll have to wait 2 hours for those."

Later, after lunch, I was ushered into the reading room. Here, you look down into one of the Palais's medieval courtyards, framed by buttery-yellow stone arches and columns. Another archivist took the note I'd made and brought my documents. He deposited them one after another - thumping great piles of paper tied up with string. I started to read.

In front of me at another table there was a couple leafing through old documents. The woman was silent but every so often the man, who looked like an old paysan, thumped the table or cursed - putain!
in a booming voice. The reading room 'invigilator' went over after a while and said politely: "Monsieur, I would just remind you that we are always quiet in the reading room. Silence aids concentration wonderfully. You have a marvellous voice but it carries!"

The old chap beamed at him and said proudly: "This voice is the result of wine, tobacco and a life spent in the open air with my goats." He promised to shut up.

I read offical and personal letters and legal documents from the 19th century which didn't contain the answers I was looking for. I found out that the old quarry close to home had been functioning as a business since at least 1850. There was no information on the buildings in the hamlet. Were they built when a plaster factory was added to the quarry? Were they originally farm buildings, bought by the quarry company to house workers?

An elderly archivist tried to guide me to an ancient map of the area. Scanned into the archive database, she was unable to find it. "I do hate this new technology" she said. "How does it work?" How it worked was immaterial really - when I displayed the image it was so faded that it could just as easily have been a diagram of someone's heart and lungs as a map of an old olive grove and quarry.

I learned a frustrating amount about the history of gypse and olive production in the Vaucluse that afternoon - enough to make me more curious but not enough to solve the puzzle. I'll now try the Isle sur Sorgue archives and possibly talk to Lafarge, the big French company which gradually swallowed up Provencal quarries in the 20th century.

As I left the fabulous archive at the Palais des Papes, the old goatherd looked up at me. I was struggling to re-tie the string round my fat bundles of paper. Somehow the string seemed shorter than when I'd un-tied it. I cursed quietly under my breath. The old chap beamed and nodded. Then he put a finger to his lips and whispered: 'Sssh!'