Cape Verde
Pedra de Lume
Float in brine 27 times saltier than the sea, inside an extinct volcano's crater.
You walk in through a tunnel cut in the crater wall and come out into another logic: pale salt pans, still water, rusted winches, and rock rising all round. Lie back and the brine simply refuses to let you sink.
Pedra de Lume is a salt lake filling the collapsed crater of an extinct volcano on Sal, the island the salt trade named. Seawater seeps in and evaporates to a brine roughly 27 times saltier than the ocean, shallow enough to stand in and dense enough to float in without a stroke. The pans were worked commercially through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, shipping salt as far as Brazil; the access tunnel was cut through the crater wall, and in 1921 an eleven-hundred-metre cableway began hauling 25 tonnes of salt an hour down to the bay. Large-scale extraction stopped in 1985, leaving winches and timber to rust in the mineral air while bathers drift below them.
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Solo
Go early, before the excursion loops arrive, and float at the centre of a volcano with nothing overhead but wind crossing the rim.
Couple
Float side by side in water that holds you up, then walk the industrial remains while the salt dries on your skin.
Family
Children float effortlessly here, which is its own delight; mind the concentrated brine around eyes and cuts, and rinse everyone afterwards.
Friends
Walk in through the tunnel together and come out grinning; the photograph of a whole group sitting on water never gets old.
- The salt pans lie inside an extinct volcanic crater entered through a tunnel cut in its wall.
- The brine is roughly 27 times saltier than seawater, so bathers float without effort.
- Salt was worked here commercially until 1985, and the cableway and processing remains still stand.
- Pedra de Lume ranks among Sal's celebrated seven natural wonders.
There is no proper kitchen in the crater; plan lunch in Santa Maria or Espargos after the float.
Rinse off, then find grilled tuna or stewed conch among Sal's kitchens; the island's tables run on the Atlantic.
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