Discover Malta's Il-Blata l-Bajda Salt Pans

📍 Location

The coordinates of Il-Blata l-Bajda Salt Pans are:

• 35.967525, 14.393749

Here’s a brief, history of the Il-Blata l-Bajda salt pans

Quick summary

Age / Origins: Small, private salt pans were originally carved along this coastal shelf by local families for food preservation. The Calafáto Industrial Operation (1930): While individual peasant and family-operated pans dotted Malta's coastline for centuries, the Selmun installation was formalized on June 1, 1930, when the Government of Malta granted a lease to the Calafáto family (who operated a major tanning business in Marsa) to establish a dedicated, industrial-scale salt-producing facility at Il-Blata l-Bajda beneath Selmun.

Engineering & Layout: The site was engineered as a multi-tier operation. It utilized the natural slope of the coralline limestone shelving and clay cliffs. Seawater was channeled into primary settling basins where impurities dropped out, before being gravity-fed down into the shallow crystallization pans closer to the sea level.

Tanning Industry Connection: The primary commercial driver for this specific installation was supplying cheap, bulk crude salt directly to hide-tanning and curing businesses on the island—an essential preservation step before chemical tanning agents became widely imported.

The Fatal Storm of the 1980s: Although production scaled down in the post-war decades, the pans were still intermittently maintained and harvested. The definitive end came in the 1980s when a massive winter storm slammed the northern coast, smashing the low retaining walls of the pans, filling the channels with heavy rubble and clay runoff, and making further commercial repair economically unviable.

Current Status: Today, the site exists as an open-air industrial ruin. While heavily weathered by salt spray and wave action, the geometric outlines of the primary reservoirs, channels, and crystallization basins remain clearly visible to hikers exploring the coastal trail beneath the Selmun promontory.