Salinas do Porto Inglês

Overview

The Salinas do Porto Inglês are a salt flat and shallow coastal lagoon on the west coast of Maio, starting about 400 m north of the last houses of Cidade do Porto Inglês, the island town also known as Vila do Maio or simply Porto Inglês. The site covers 534.7 hectares, of which 400.6 are land and 134.1 are marine, and it sits at sea level, with ground between 3 and 12 m above the water.

It is not one thing but four: the lagoon basin where seawater collects and evaporates into crusts of salt, the line of sand dunes that separates that basin from the Atlantic, a rocky semi-desert on the north east side, and a belt of acacias that spread from a plantation towards the road to Morro. The lagoon changes size within a year and between years, and after heavy rain it is at its largest.

The salinas carry two designations. Nationally they are a Paisagem Protegida, a protected landscape, legally protected since Decree-Law 3/2003, and one of Maio’s seven protected areas confirmed in the 2014 revision. Internationally they are Ramsar site number 2182, Salinas of the English Port, one of Cape Verde’s wetlands of international importance, designated on 3 July 2013 for their birds, their turtles and their salt.

Set your expectations plainly. This is a flat, open, working wetland at the edge of a small town, not a set piece. There is no crater rim, no boardwalk and no bathing in brine as there is at Pedra de Lume on Sal. What you get instead is a wide white and grey basin with wading birds picking along its edges, dunes on one side and the town on the other, and salt still being lifted by hand in small quantities: the Ramsar record filed in 2013 counted more than 70 women making a living from it, and described that extraction as sustainable and as the thing that keeps the area from being abandoned. That count is more than a decade old and no newer figure could be found, so treat it as the scale of the activity rather than today’s headcount.

Most visitors to Maio see the salinas on foot as part of a morning around town, and an hour or two is enough unless you are watching birds.

History

Salt made this town. Traditional extraction at the site goes back to the 16th and 17th centuries, and the island’s settlement followed the salt rather than the other way round: Maio was grazed for goats first and populated properly only at the end of the 16th century, once the salt was worth working. The municipality’s own history says the salt was exported, to Brazil among other destinations, and that the trade held up into the 19th century.

The port took its name from the ships that came for it. Porto Inglês means English port, a reference to the English vessels that loaded Maio salt here, and the municipality describes the town’s prosperous period as the one in which the English were shipping that salt to Europe. The same page is blunt about who benefited: the island’s natural salt production was coveted by colonisers and traders and considered highly profitable, and it did little for the people who worked it. An 18th century fort was built beside the town against pirate raids, which tells you what the cargo was worth.

Two more recent threads are worth knowing before you walk in. Bird populations here have been monitored by the Maio Biodiversity Foundation since 2010, alongside nesting data for loggerhead turtles, so the species lists attached to this site are the product of continuous counting rather than one survey. And development pressure is the recorded threat: a beach resort begun in 2008 next to the site was still unfinished when the Ramsar sheet was filed, and the listing itself calls for regulation to prevent over-construction of tourist structures.

Visiting

Walk. The salinas begin roughly 400 m beyond the built edge of town in a straight line, the middle of the site is about 2.4 km from the town centre by the map, and the whole thing is bounded by the sea to the west, the village of Morro to the north and the Morro to Porto Inglês road to the east. Head north out of town on that road and you are alongside the pans within 20 minutes or so, with the airstrip on your right. If you would rather not walk, the island’s transport is taxis and hiaces, the shared minibuses, and the same road serves Morro.

What you see depends on the month. Seawater pushes over the dunes into the basin around March and April, rain runs off the high ground and fills it further between roughly July and October, and through the dry months the water evaporates and leaves a hardening white crust that reaches its peak at the end of the dry season. Water depth never exceeds about a metre. September and October give you the largest sheet of water and the best reflections; the spring and early summer months give you salt.

For birds, work the edges rather than the middle. Nine wader species have been recorded, concentrated along the coastal edge of the pans, with Kentish plover and sanderling the most numerous; ringed plover, whimbrel, turnstone, grey plover, greenshank and black-winged stilt also turn up, and the dunes and rocky ground hold larks, including greater hoopoe-lark, black-crowned sparrow-lark and bar-tailed desert lark. The two headline numbers: the site holds 150 to 300 Kentish plovers, the largest population of the Cape Verdean form in the Atlantic, and between 10 and 13% of the world population of the cream-coloured courser breeds inside it. There are no flamingos here, whatever you may have read about salt pans elsewhere. In the rocky zone, look down instead: the geckos and skinks recorded there are endemic to Cape Verde and two of them are found only on Maio.

The dune ridge on the seaward side is a nesting site for the endangered loggerhead turtle. Maio holds one of the world’s larger nesting colonies of the species. From June to October teams patrol the nesting beaches every night under a licence from the national environment directorate, so anything you do at the dunes after dark in season should be with those monitors, not on your own initiative.

There is an interpretation centre for the salinas. The Maio Biodiversity Foundation’s visitor listing gives its hours as 09:00 to 17:00 and marks the protected landscape itself as freely accessible. Which days it opens, and whether it is staffed when you turn up, could not be confirmed from any source, so ask in town before making a special trip for it.

Tips

Go early or late. The site is flat, unshaded and pale, so the middle of the day is hard on the eyes and poor for both birds and photographs, while the first and last hours give you low light across the water and the crust.

The Maio Biodiversity Foundation publishes the rules for the island’s protected areas, and they apply here: stay on the paths, do not pick plants or take animals, avoid excessive noise, carry your rubbish out, use only biodegradable products, wear suitable clothes and footwear, and do not light fires or smoke where it is prohibited. The same organisation publishes a map of which activities are allowed in which zone, which is the thing to consult if you are planning anything beyond walking and looking.

Footwear matters more than you would expect on ground this flat. Salt crust looks solid and is not always solid, the margins are mud, and the rocky section on the north east side is loose and dusty. Closed shoes, not sandals.

If people are working the pans, keep off the ones in use and ask before photographing anyone. Salt extraction here is a livelihood rather than a demonstration, and it is one of the reasons the area is still in the condition it is in.

Nothing here costs money, so bring water rather than cash. If you do need escudos for the rest of the day, the foundation’s advice for the island is to bring euros and change them at a bank, since cards usually work but can fail at some machines; the exchange rate it quotes visitors is fixed at 1 EUR to 110 CVE.

Finally, make it a loop rather than a there and back. The fort and lighthouse, the old sobrado townhouse and the parish church of Nossa Senhora da Luz are all in town within walking distance of each other and free to enter, so the salinas fit naturally onto the end of a town walk before the heat arrives.