Luxury Hotels Atlas / Places / Italy / Paceco / Relais Antiche Saline
Relais Antiche Saline
Paceco, Italy · Independent · Near Luxury
The salt is still raked by hand outside the door. This is the baglio of the Marchesi Platamone, a farmhouse that once housed salt workers' families, restored in 2005 into eighteen rooms inside the Trapani and Paceco salt pan reserve. Flamingos, avocets and black-winged stilts break their migration here. There is no restaurant on site: you walk 150 metres along the causeways between the pans to the Trattoria del Sale, beside the salt museum, with the Egadi Islands spread out in front of you.
- 18 rooms
- Opened 2005
About Relais Antiche Saline
- The salt museum next door occupies a seventeenth-century casa salaria and its windmill. Ferdinand the Catholic ordered the mill and the surrounding Chiusicella salt pan built in 1488.
- Alberto Culcasi took on the derelict salina as a young man and rebuilt it after the 1965 flood. In 1984 he leased part of the buildings to Paceco for the museum, and his family still runs the pans, the museum and the trattoria.
- The watchtower beside the salina was part of Sicily's coastal warning system, raised against Barbary corsairs who came for the salt.
- The water in front of the hotel was the site of the Battle of the Aegates in 241 BC, the naval defeat that ended the First Punic War for Carthage.
History
The building is the baglio of the Marchesi Platamone, a Sicilian country house at Nubia in the comune of Paceco, out among the salt pans between Trapani and Marsala. For generations it housed the families of the salinari, the men who worked the pans. A careful restoration turned it into a four-star of eighteen rooms, no two alike, which opened in 2005. Nothing was smoothed away: the stonework, the courtyard and the low horizontal lines of the original rural architecture all survive, and the rooms look out over the salt basins to the sea.
The hotel sits inside the Riserva Naturale delle Saline di Trapani e Paceco, managed by WWF Italia. There is an outdoor pool, a small wellness area and a Mediterranean garden with a solarium, but no restaurant: guests walk out along the causeways to the Trattoria del Sale, next to the Museo del Sale. All three operations, the hotel, the museum and the trattoria, sit in the orbit of the Culcasi family, who revived the Chiusicella salina and still harvest it with hand tools.
The setting
Nubia is a hamlet whose people have always split their year between farming and salt. The pans in front of the hotel are worked the way they have been for centuries, with wooden tools, Archimedes screws and windmills, and the salt museum in the old casa salaria keeps the equipment and the photographs. The Salina Chiusicella and its mill were built in 1488 on the orders of Ferdinand the Catholic, and the Nubia tower beside it belonged to the chain of coastal watchtowers that warned of Barbary corsairs, who raided for the salt as much as for people. Trapani's port, from which the salt sailed to Denmark, Sweden and England, is about six kilometres away, and Erice sits on its mountain eighteen kilometres off. Straight out to sea lie the Egadi Islands, where Rome broke the Carthaginian fleet in 241 BC. Nubia is also known for its red garlic, a Slow Food presidium.
Experiences
- Guided visit to the Riserva Naturale delle Saline — Guided visits to the Saline Culcasi nature reserve, booked through the hotel.
Amenities
- Staff professionale al servizio degli ospiti
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