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Salines FOREVER L ’ U LT I M E S A L I N E Sailors on the route to India dreamed of putting in on the old Isle de France, not for its sugar but for its salt. In the hulls, the salted fish and other meat would feed them for their long sea voyages. Of these providential saltpans, only one remains:Yemen-Tamarin. Les marins sur la route des Indes rêvaient d’escales sur l’ancienne Isle de France. Pour son sel, pas pour son sucre. Au fond des cales, les salaisons de poissons et de chair fraîche les ravitailleraient au long cours. De ces salines providentielles, il n’en reste qu’une, celle deYemen-Tamarin. A A vital part of Mauritius heritage has been saved. Highly coveted by property developers, and an emblem of a fishing village in the southwest of the island with its mixed delights, the Yemen- Tamarin saltpans are resisting the inevitable rise of concrete along the seashore. They stretch over 25 hectares below the stony slopes of the Rempart crater, the remains of an explosive caldera. Their grids of midnight blue basalt and clay soil, liquid mirrors of a cubist sky, heat the seawater so that it evaporates into a white icing spread over the volcanic stones. The alchemy of the salt, from the “ripening” basins to the heaters and crystallisers, comes from the ocean, the sun, the rain and the wind. Like sailors, salt workers are subjected to the vagaries of the weather. Jan Maingard, a poetic and colourful vision It was here in 1949 that René Maingard resto- red his family’s two-hundred-year-old saltpans. Jan Maingard, one of the heirs, a poet and story- teller in creole, roguish historian and author of the comic book Tamarin Matin , is moving heaven and earth to defend them. He takes us for a chat at the top of the steps of a limekiln, a watchtower from where Jan watches over his land encircled by the tarmac of the coastal road and besieged by luxury residential estates. The long white hair of this sixty-something fellow, with his look of the eternal rebel, an eccentric element of a family of “rich whites” who set sail from Saint Malo in 1747, flies in the ocean breeze. In a wide gesture, he surveys “his” village that he has drawn so often: charming, disparate houses of concrete or corrugated iron, thatched huts, a bright pink Hindu temple, a flamboyant tree about to flame with colour, the old clanking blue metal bridge that crosses the river, and gourmet stands where you can enjoy a sweet potato turnover filled with coconut, crushed papayas or candied limes. Further away, where the “Caleçons roses” – the local surfers in their pink shorts – ride the waves, you can hear a few notes of jazz from the old hôtel Tamarin which marks out the filao trees along the beach in a very 60s style orange. A giant areca palm spreads its creeping branches and aerial roots at our feet: a perfect playground for the kids. An irrepressible Creole, Jan retains his idyllic vision. Sometimes he complains, but mostly he softens his outspokenness with a “zoli-zoli” patois: “ Even back in my father Amédée’s time – he had great ideas for Mauritian tou- rism – the government disapproved of our saltpans, annoyed by the attitude of the old French colonial families, ” he begins, grumbling about the politicians and their hostility to these heirlooms of bygone times, in the name of “improving the land”. by Jean-Pascal Billaud Photographs GADA