About the Park

Welcome to the land of salt

In the Sečovlje Salina Nature Park, the past and the present are still shaking hands. The ancient way of saltpanning, which the saltpanners of Piran learned long ago from their teachers, the saltpanners of the island of Pag, is still something special today, even by Mediterranean standards.

The traditional manual harvesting of salt on the salt plots is not only a special feature of the cultural heritage of Mediterranean Slovenia, but also provides the conditions for preserving the most important natural heritage of the Sečovlje Salt Pans. According to written sources, the Sečovlje salt pans are more than 700 years old, but some authors swear that they are considerably older. Once salt pans were everywhere along the sea coast in Slovenian Istria, but today they are preserved only at Sečovlje and Strunjan. In 1989, the Sečovlje salt pans were protected as a landscape park, where only economic activities that do not endanger the natural balance are allowed. Today, the salt pans are protected by a national regulation as a Landscape Park.

For visitors, the abandoned part of the salt pans, called Fontanigge, is the most attractive, as it offers unique scenes for the Slovenian landscape - many birds, vast meadows of halophytes and over 100 abandoned and demolished salt pans.

The Sečovlje salt pans were given an international blessing in 1993, when they were recognised as a Ramsar site, which obliges Slovenia, as a signatory, to protect the marshes as bird habitats. And there are indeed not a few of them in the salt pans and the surrounding area. To date, we have counted more than 300 of them.

And why are there so many different species of birds in the salt marshes? The salt marsh habitat is a large body of water that birds use for roosting or wintering when they migrate. As the water bodies in Slovenian Istria began to be deforested due to increasing urbanisation, the Sečovlje Salt Pans have gained in importance over the years. The abandonment of salt extraction in the southern half of the salt pans has played a major role in this. Although salt harvesting ceased, the salt producers still maintained the dykes and ensured that the water level in the salt pans was adequate, thus preserving the salt pans' biotopes. The processes of natural forces have also played their part. They have created a multitude of similar but sufficiently different biotopes, which have been colonised by birds with different feeding and nesting requirements. Seawater flowing deep into the salt marshes through the salt marsh channels brings a wealth of food into the salt marshes, which birds can forage for in the shallow pools of the abandoned part of the salt marshes. These are mainly planktonic organisms, small invertebrates and juvenile fish. In spring, the salt marshes, which are an extended land-sea boundary for birds, become an important breeding ground for many bird species.

The special feature of the salt pans is the halophytes. These are plants in the butterwort family that are adapted to living on salty soils. They can be found on the edges of the salt pans and on the banks of the salt canals. They are not difficult to identify. They have fleshy stems and fleshy, scaly leaves that hold water reserves and salt glands through which they excrete excess salt. Halophytes are most beautiful in late summer. This is when the halophyte meadows turn reddish-purple and give a special impression to the salt area.