Salt Museum Pomorie

Worth a detour

The only museum in Bulgaria — and, it says, in eastern Europe — devoted to making salt by solar evaporation of sea water, and it is half museum and half working saltworks. Twenty decares of evaporating and crystallising pans are still operated by the ancient Anchialos method, and from July to September you can watch the whole process. It costs about €2.

Story

Background

The town resolved in 1973 to make a reserve of the old Pomorie salt pans, and in 1976 veteran salters restored a set of basins to the Anchialos pattern: sea water admitted at one end and walked slowly through a chain of shallow pans as it concentrates, then raked off by hand at the other. The museum built around them opened on 7 September 2002, funded through a sequence of European projects, and is one of the hundred national tourist sites.

The outdoor half is the good half. It is the only salt pan left inside the town, it produces real salt, the yield depends entirely on the weather, and all the operations can be watched through the summer. The indoor hall holds photographs from the early twentieth century, old survey maps, models, the tools the salters used, and copies of Ottoman documents from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century.

There is also a section on lye, the concentrated brine left when the salt has crystallised, from which the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences developed the medicinal and cosmetic preparations sold at the counter. That is the link to the rest of Pomorie: the same lagoon that produces the salt produces the mud the town's sanatoria have used for a century. The museum stands on the narrow strip between the lake and the pans, behind the stadium, and the lake visitor centre is next door; a combined ticket for both is about €3.