Salt cod and the Danish king: the history of salt in Reykjanes

Salt making at Reykjanes is not new. We revived it.

A country without salt

For a nation that lived from the sea, salt mattered. Cod that is salted and dried keeps for months and travels well, and salt cod became one of Iceland's most important exports, shipped to markets across southern Europe. But Iceland, with its cold and wet climate, had no easy way to make its own salt.

The king's saltworks

In the 1700s, when Iceland was part of the Danish kingdom, the Danish king established a saltworks at Reykjanes in the Westfjords. The reason was the hot springs: free heat coming out of the ground, right next to the sea, enough to turn seawater into salt for the salt cod trade. Salt makers were sent to Reykjanes, and they used much the same method we use today: seawater, heated in pans by geothermal water.

Many of the salt makers were married couples who worked side by side. The old records even include a letter from the local sheriff in Ísafjörður to the king, worried that married salt makers would be too distracted to work.

Two centuries of silence

The saltworks did not last. Within a few decades production stopped, and for the next two centuries Iceland imported its salt. As Björn tells it, the salty steam rusted the iron equipment of the time, which did not help.

Found in the archives

Björn Steinar Jónsson was finishing his engineering studies in Copenhagen, and working in restaurants on the side, when he noticed that no one was making salt in Iceland anymore. Researching how salt was once made in the Nordic countries, he came across the story of the Westfjords salt makers in Iceland's national archives, and learned that the old saltworks had been built on the same idea he wanted to build a business on: Icelandic geothermal energy.

It was also a time when Iceland was recovering from the financial crisis, and Björn wanted to make something new that the people of the Westfjords could be proud of. In the summer of 2011 he ran the first geothermal salt experiments at Reykjanes, on the same spot as the king's saltworks, with the same two ingredients: Arctic seawater and geothermal heat.

Today the salt that once went into barrels of cod goes onto plates in kitchens around the world. Read how we make it or our story.