Ecomuseum Marais Salant — Attraction in La Rochelle

Lovely little salt museum, a working marshland industry with a small museum, a guided tour of the salt pans and a nice gift shop, where everything seems very reasonably priced. It’s quite difficult to follow the guided tour (only in French) so I’d recommend the English info sheet to enhance the experience. We picked ripe seeds of the Maceron plant which grows everywhere in the marshes and is ripe in September. It’s actually Alexander (type of wild celery) but the seeds do a good job as doubling for pepper. They are supposed to taste of truffles. Make sure you purchase the white fleur de sel. It’s stratospherically expensive off island and reputed to be the best in the world because of the rich mix of trace elements or ‘dark nutrients’ as they...

Small exhibition on the salt collection history and process indoors and the live action outdoors. 5 eur pp. If you want a guide make sure you get there before 1800, because the place closes at 1900. Also closed for lunchtime. You can see the outdoor salt collection process also in the nearby salt ponds and the surrounding waterworks. The bike path goes through these muddy fields, featuring a peculiar landscape. It is interesting, but at the same time the museum could do more or could have done more for non french speakers. Some subtitles or translations.are easy to creat nowadays. There is a small gift shop, too. Nice for...

Nice little place. The downside is there are no English speaking tour guides and the museum is all written with no translations. You have to do a self guided tour outside but they give you a map with some basic translation and descriptions. Unfortunately this meant it was only a short visit for the money. Little shop onsite to buy souvenirs. I should give 2* for the English translations but if you can speak French I am sure this would be unfair as it seemed to be quite...