Pedra de Lume is one of the most astonishing and photogenic places in Cape Verde: salt pans built inside the crater of an extinct volcano, on the east coast of the island of Sal. From outside you'd never guess; you have to walk through a tunnel cut into the rock to discover, on the crater floor, a surreal mosaic of saltwater ponds in shades of white, pink and ochre, ringed by the walls of the volcano.
Its great appeal, besides the lunar landscape, is that the water in the ponds has an extremely high salt concentration — up to 27 times that of the sea — which lets you float without any effort, lying on your back, just like in the Dead Sea. Floating in the middle of a volcanic crater, smearing yourself with salty mud and taking in the colours of the salt pans is an experience unique in the archipelago, and that's why Pedra de Lume is among the Seven Natural Wonders of Cape Verde.
This guide covers Pedra de Lume from a practical angle: what this salt crater is and how it formed, the experience of floating in its waters, its history as a salt works complete with a cable car, how to get there from Santa Maria and how to combine the visit with the rest of the island of Sal. It's one of the must-do excursions on Cape Verde's sunniest island.
The Pedra de Lume salt pans make use of an extinct volcanic crater connected to the sea through underground seepage: as the water evaporates under the sun, it leaves behind very pure salt. Worked by hand since the 18th century, in the early 20th century a French company modernised extraction with a tunnel and a cable car that carried the salt to the port, in what became the island's biggest industry. When the salt trade declined, the salt pans were turned into a tourist attraction and natural spa. Today they are one of the country's Seven Natural Wonders. Their full story is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The flat eastern islands, golden with salt and dunes: they first lived off the salt in their craters, and today off beach tourism, kitesurfing and the turtles that nest in their sand.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The story of Pedra de Lume begins millions of years ago, with geology. The island of Sal, like the whole Cape Verde archipelago, is volcanic in origin, and on its east coast lies the crater of an ancient volcano, long extinct and worn down by erosion. This almost circular crater, with a radius of about 900 metres, has one extraordinary feature: its floor sits below sea level, and it is in fact the lowest point in all of the Cape Verde islands.
Because it is so close to the coast and below sea level, seawater seeps through the ground into the crater and forms pools. Under Sal's relentless sun and dry wind, that water evaporates very quickly, leaving behind huge amounts of very pure crystallised salt. Without any human help, nature had built a perfect salt factory hidden inside a volcano.
The colours here are surreal: the saltwater pools take on shades from white to deep pink, depending on how concentrated the salt is and which microorganisms are present, and they stand out against the mounds of white salt and the ochre walls of the crater. For centuries this treasure stayed almost out of reach, until people decided to exploit it systematically.
For centuries salt was an extremely valuable commodity, essential for preserving meat and fish before refrigeration. The island of Sal takes its name from these salt pans, and Pedra de Lume was its great deposit. Salt was already being worked in the crater by hand in the 18th century, when labourers dug it out manually and hauled it to the coast with enormous difficulty to be shipped.
The big leap came in the early 20th century. A French company, the 'Compagnie des Salins du Cap-Vert', modernised the operation with an ambitious investment: a tunnel was cut through the crater wall to make access easier, and above all an aerial cableway was built to carry the salt from the crater floor to a jetty on the coast, crossing both the height difference and the distance. It was one of the most remarkable engineering works in Cape Verde at the time.
At its peak, Pedra de Lume was the biggest industry on Sal and an important source of jobs, with its own workers' village. The salt was exported to markets in West Africa and elsewhere. The once lonely crater became a hive of activity, with evaporation pools, warehouses, the cableway and teams of salt workers toiling under the scorching sun.
Like so many traditional industries, salt production at Pedra de Lume ended up a victim of progress. Over the 20th century, several factors combined to sink the business. The most important was the spread of refrigeration and freezing, which drastically reduced the need to salt food to preserve it, the big market that had kept salt in demand for centuries.
On top of that came competition from larger, cheaper and better-located sources of salt around the world, plus the logistical difficulty of exporting from a remote island with few resources like Sal. The salt pans became less and less profitable, investment pulled out and, in time, industrial salt production at Pedra de Lume stopped. The cableway stopped running, the warehouses emptied and the facilities were left abandoned to the elements.
For years the salt crater was little more than a forgotten curiosity, with its salt pools, its rusting ruins and its shrinking village. Sal, an island that had lived off salt, had to look for its future elsewhere. That future, like the whole island's, would turn out to be tourism, and it would change the fate of Pedra de Lume too.
With the tourism boom on Sal from the 1980s and 1990s onwards, Pedra de Lume found a second life. The crater's surreal landscape, with its coloured pools and industrial ruins, and above all the chance to float in its hypersaline water (an experience comparable to the Dead Sea), turned it into one of the most unusual attractions in the archipelago.
The salt pans were set up for visitors: pools were opened for bathing, salt mud and spa treatments were offered to make the most of the water's minerals, and the site became part of the classic island tour, along with the Buracona cave and other spots. The high salinity that had once made the salt valuable now became the draw of a one-of-a-kind natural spa.
Official recognition came when Pedra de Lume was declared National Heritage and chosen as one of the Seven Natural Wonders of Cape Verde. Today, thousands of visitors go down into the crater every year to float in its water, cover themselves in salty mud and photograph the colours of the pools, while the old cableway structures recall the site's industrial past.
Visiting Pedra de Lume today means immersing yourself, literally and figuratively, in a place where geology, history and pleasure meet. Geology, because the volcanic crater and its hypersaline water are an extraordinary natural phenomenon, the lowest point in Cape Verde and one of its wonders. History, because the ruins of the cableway, the tunnel and the village tell the epic story of the salt that gave the island its name and supported its people for generations.
And pleasure, because floating on your back in the warm pink pools, surrounded by the crater walls and Sal's blue sky, is as fun as it is relaxing, and it sums up the surprising desert appeal of this island. Few places capture the passing of time so well: from geological treasure to industry, from industry to ruin, and from ruin to tourist wonder.
In short, Pedra de Lume is a symbol of Sal itself: a place that seemed doomed by its dryness and isolation, and that managed to turn what it had (salt, sun, an extreme landscape) into something unique. Whoever goes down into its crater doesn't just enjoy an unusual swim; with their skin coated in salt, they touch the history of Cape Verde.
