“It's a way of maintaining landscapes and perpetuating salt marshes,” explains Brice Thomas enthusiastically.
This 30-year-old has just created and set up a salt worker activity in La Tremblade, “the salt farmer”, as he says.
Former oyster beds connected to the Seudre have been restored and adapted to this profession, which is still not very common in Royan: only two other professionals have attempted this adventure in the sector in recent years!
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After taking possession of these two hectares of land in November, Brice Thomas completed the leveling work at the end of May and designed basins better suited to the evaporation of seawater. The first is used to store the resource.
“This reserve allows me to last up to 15 days in autonomy before new favorable tidal coefficients.
It then feeds my heating circuit, where the salt meanders through the basins and begins to concentrate.
The water then ends up in one of my 20 crystallizers,” explains the neo-saunier, originally from the Ile de Ré.
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Between the entrance to the site and the place where the salt is harvested, this path offered to the sun and the wind has a slope of 20 centimeters.
"The water circulates there at slow speed, it is the know-how of the salt workers, a real engineering imagined by our elders", smiles Thomas.
Preserving this heritage as far as Royannais is precisely what motivated Brice Thomas' adventure.
A former tennis teacher for 10 years in a tourist complex in La Palmyre, the 30-year-old imagined changing his life and "turning towards sailing".
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But a few trips abroad have revived in him memories of youth and the desire to enhance his own terroir.
“I became aware of the role of farmers and their impact on landscapes.
But how to invest in Charente-Maritime?
How to represent the territory?
There are oysters, cognac and salt, I chose the latter”, he insists.
Trained as a saunier-paludier in Guérande (Loire-Atlantique) then on the island of Oléron, Brice Thomas then identified a dozen sites on the Seudre, before choosing this one, in La Tremblade.
“These 2 hectares – two-thirds of which are in water – are the smallest marshes possible to set up as a professional”, he underlines.
The 30-year-old hopes to produce 10 tons of coarse salt and one ton of fleur de sel per year.
Enough, he calculates, to make a living from it and anchor the profession of salt worker in the territory for a long time.
