White gold to memory: How Goa's 1,500-year-old salt pans are vanishing

Goa’s traditional salt industry is on the brink. The sun that once turned Goa’s estuaries into sheets of white gold now sets on empty pans. From over hundreds of active salt pans, merely 50 survive today. A trade that fed Goa kitchens for centuries is dying — quietly under a burning sunFor over 1,500 years, Goa’s salt pans glittered along the Mandovi and the Zuari estuaries. Salcete, Tiswadi, Bardez and Pernem talukas lived by the sun, wind, and tide. Each summer, salt workers channelled brackish estuary water into earthen pans, raked it for a few hours, and harvested coarse crystals that fed Goan kitchens, fish curers, and prawn farms. This was ‘Goa salt’ — unrefined, mineral-rich, sharp on the tongue.But today, it is slowly fading into memory. Once exported globally to Asian, Arabian and African countries, Goan salt is dying a slow death.