Sečovlje Salina Nature Park — Traditional Salt-Making Sustaining a Ramsar Wetland (Slovenia)

Sečovlje Salina Nature Park covers 750 hectares on Slovenia's Adriatic coast. Piran municipality declared it a park in 1990, it was listed under the Ramsar Convention in 1993 and the State gave it protection in 2001; it lies in Natura 2000 as both an SPA and an SCI. The park lists 296 documented bird species.
Salt is still harvested by hand at Lera using centuries-old methods, while harvesting ceased in the 1960s at Fontanigge. Soline d.o.o. holds the state concession (from 2001) and manages the park; Piran Salt gained EU PDO status in 2014 and the practice was entered in Slovenia's intangible heritage register in 2015.
Caveats from a 2023 heritage study: tension between cultural and nature-conservation management; museum attendance fell from about 25,000 (2005) to about 3,000 (2019); of roughly 493 mid-19th-century salt houses only about 70 remained, as ruins at risk from subsidence and flooding. Bird-species counts are cumulative records, not population trends, and no carbon or water-quality data were found.

Read the full analysis: https://www.naravniparkislovenije.si/en/nature-parks/secovlje-salina-nature-park