Landscape configuration in the litoralmediterranean salt holdings: The case of San Pedro del Pinatar saltworks (Murcia, Spain)

Abstract

The economic importance of the salt industry for centuries has allowed safeguard many of these sites against urbanization processes in the coast, maintaining some of the most outstanding and evocative landscapes of the Mediterranean coastline. There has been a symbiosis, in which the configuration of the landscape and the species of flora and fauna present are the result of the salt exploitation avtivity, and this activity has been able to develop due to the special characteristics of the physical environment. San Pedro del Pinatar Salines are a consolidated industrial exploitation and still keep the traditional and distinctive character, thanks to a series of historical processes of modernization and expansion that enabled it to adapt to the socio-economic needs of each moment.