Musée des marais salants, Museum in Batz-sur-Mer, France
The Musée des Marais Salants is a public museum in Batz-sur-Mer, in the Loire-Atlantique region, devoted to the history of salt production in the surrounding marshes. It holds around nine thousand items, including photographs, maps, artworks, textiles and manuscripts, arranged across three sections that cover salt history, marsh life and local traditions.
The first salt marshes in the Guérande peninsula appeared in the 9th century, when people dug canals and built shallow pools to collect salt from seawater. The museum itself was founded in 1887 by a local nun called Adèle Pichon, closed in 1969, then reopened in 1984 after a restoration completed in 2013.
At the Musée des Marais Salants, salt is more than a product; it is the thread running through daily life in the Guérande region for centuries. Visitors can handle some of the objects on display and watch short films that bring the rhythms of marsh life closer.
The museum sits in the center of Batz-sur-Mer, close to the sea and the salt marshes, making it easy to combine with a walk around the area. There is free parking nearby, and the building is accessible for pushchairs and wheelchairs.
Inside one of the museum's renovated buildings stands a large salt-washing machine that originally operated until 1965 and weighs around 6 tons (about 5.4 metric tons); several companies worked together to rebuild it on its original site. A team from the École Centrale de Nantes modeled the machine in 3D and created an interactive version accessible on a touchscreen, so visitors can see and hear how it once worked.
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