You come round a bend in Álava and the hillside above the village is terraced – thousands of shallow wooden trays stepped down the slope on stilts, pale and geometric, with water running between them in hollowed-out pine channels. It looks like an art installation and it is a factory, and it has been working, on and off, for about six and a half thousand years.

The salt comes from a spring. There was a sea here two hundred million years ago; the water that surfaces at Añana has been running through what is left of it, and it comes out of the ground at a salinity around six times that of the Atlantic. No pumping, no heating. The brine is carried by gravity along the wooden channels into the pans, the sun does the rest, and in summer a pan can go from water to salt in a day.

Get the credentials right, because most write-ups do not

This is not a UNESCO World Heritage Site, whatever you may read. It has been on Spain’s tentative list since 2012, which is a different thing entirely. What it genuinely holds is FAO recognition as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System, awarded in 2017 – a designation for living agricultural landscapes rather than monuments, and exactly the right one for a place that is still making the product it was making in the Neolithic. It has also been on the European Route of Industrial Heritage since 2019.

How a visit works

This is the part to plan. The valley is run by the Fundación Valle Salado de Añana, and visits are guided and booked in advance rather than wandered into. There are several versions: a heritage and environmental tour, a salt-making workshop where you harvest from a pan yourself, family workshops, a spring visit, an adapted and accessible visit, and a virtual-reality one.

Book through the foundation directly – [email protected], or +34 945 351 111 – and confirm times and prices with them when you do, since both move with the season.

The bit everyone remembers

At the end there is a pediluvium – a saltwater footbath built into the old wells the salt workers used – and a saline spa. You sit on the edge of a stone trough with your feet in water six times saltier than the sea, on a hillside of white terraces, and it is both genuinely restorative and slightly absurd. Bring a towel. Nobody tells you to bring a towel.

Why it belongs in a Basque trip

Because it is thirty kilometres from Vitoria-Gasteiz, about half an hour, and roughly an hour from Bilbao, and because it is the opposite of everything else people do in the Basque Country. No queue, no Guggenheim, no pintxos crawl – a hillside, a spring and a trade older than writing.

Do it as a morning out of Vitoria, then drive twenty minutes south into Rioja Alavesa for lunch and a winery in the afternoon. That is one of the best days in northern Spain and almost nobody builds it.

And buy the salt. It is harvested by hand from these pans, the flor de sal is the one to take, and it is the best souvenir in the Basque Country – it weighs nothing and you will use it for a year.

If you would like a Basque trip put together properly – tell me what you are thinking here.