Sal’s first recorded sighting was in 1460 by navigators “Diogo Gomes” and Antonio da Noli, sailing under the Portuguese crown, although many believe that Sal as well as the other islands of the Cape Verde Archipelago may well have been known by the Moors, centuries before the Portuguese.
A Portuguese explorer Jamie Cortesao stated that Arabs used to visit an island which they referred to as “Aulil” or “Ulil” and take salt from the salt pans or “Salinas” which occur naturally all over the island. The island referred to as “Ulil” by the ancient Arabic sailors allegedly sank, but curiously, geologists have recently demonstrated that the southern part of Sal Island was covered by water, by the discovery of fossil reefs in the centre of the island.
Sal was originally named “Llana” meaning “flat”, but after the potential of salt was fully realised in the natural salt lakes in Pedra de Lume, the name was changed to “Sal”.
Espargos & the Airport
In 1939 the Portuguese colonial government granted Benedito Mussolini’s Italian government permission to construct an airport to service flights between Europe and South America. In 1945, at the end of World War II, the Portuguese purchased the airport installation from the Italians and the airport has been improved ever since to it’s status now as a fully fledged international airport.
Basic housing was built in several areas immediately adjacent to the airport, an area which became called “Preguica”,after the port on Sao Nicolau, which was where many of the workers were from. The town is officially called Espargos and is the commercial and government centre of Sal Island.
Santa Maria
Santa Maria village was founded in 1830 by Manuel Antonio Martins who was responsible for establishing the salt flats just north of the south coast.
Slaves from West Africa would remove the sand and soil from the surface exposing the rock, thus creating the salt pans, and then pumps driven by the wind would feed the sea water in. An iron railway track was then constructed which ran down to the coast, where a pier was constructed to load the salt into boats for export. It is thought that up to 30,000 tonnes of salt was exported every year from Santa Maria in this way. The prosperous business of Salt continued until the late 19th century until Sal’s main importer of salt, Brazil, focused on promoting its own fast emerging salt industry and therefore stopped nearly all salt imports from Sal.
A French company Societe Salines Sal & a German country both attempted, and failed, to revive Sal’s salt industry, and it wasn’t until 1920 that a Portuguese company, Compania do Fomento, that joined forces with another Portuguese company doing good business in the Belgian Congo that the industry and economy improved.
The birth of tourism
In 1967 Belgian Georges Vynckier built a small guest house in the centre of Santa Maria bay. In the years to follow during the apartheid, South Africa Airlines was denied air passage rights by most African nations, and this was the catalyst to expand the guest house into a hotel; to provide accommodation to the air crews whilst stopping over in Sal.
In 1986 adjacent to the site of the Morabeza hotel, the Cape Verde government built the Hotel Belorizonte. Together with several private companies who had discovered the huge watersports potential in Sal, namely diving, fishing, surfing and windsurfing, the Cape Verde government set about marketing Santa Maria a tourist destination.
In 1989 the Russian air carrier, Aeroflot, built a hotel east of Santa Maria on the beach to service flights between Moscow and Buenos Aires.
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