From Old Site to New Town: Making Alchemy with Salt

By: Gerardo Angulo Cuentas

On the shores of the Colombian Caribbean, among mangroves, brackish waters, and ancient knowledge, lies a golden opportunity that has long been overlooked. Pueblo Viejo (in english ‘Old Town’) and Sitionuevo (in english ‘New Site’), two municipalities in the department of Magdalena, maintain an ancestral relationship with salt, that millenary mineral that has served as currency, medicine, and a symbol of civilization. Yet, in times when the discourse on innovation seems reserved for Silicon Valley and digital ventures, an urgent question arises: can a grain of salt become the catalyst for a new model of territorial development?

The answer is yes—and not through the logic of disruptive innovation or high-cost scientific research, but rather through what Dan Breznitz @dbreznitz calls innovation in adaptation and implementation. This model, far from requiring futuristic laboratories, proposes looking at existing capabilities with fresh eyes, valuing what is already known, and improving processes with creativity, appropriate technology, and collective effort. In other words, transforming what seemed like an “old site” into a truly “new town.”

The communities of Pueblo Viejo and Sitionuevo have privileged geographical conditions for the production of sea salt through solar evaporation: constant sunlight, trade winds, access to the sea, and a culture that has worked with salt for generations. However, these potentialities have been neglected due to lack of investment, organizational fragmentation, and a value chain that fails to recognize or fairly compensate for artisanal labor.

Faced with this scenario, the key is not to prohibit tradition nor to import foreign models, but to activate a modern alchemy: the combination of ancestral knowledge, appropriate technology, participatory design, and new forms of market. International experiences like the salt flats of Maras (Peru), Janubio (Spain), Tehuantepec (Mexico), or Aveiro (Portugal) show that it is possible to innovate with salt when local knowledge is linked to academic networks, state support, and a strong sense of cultural identity.

Colombia, and particularly the Caribbean region, can become a reference for this type of innovation—if it bets on projects where development does not mean erasing history, but writing over it with new ink. For Pueblo Viejo and Sitionuevo, this could involve strengthening associations of salt workers, creating territorial brands such as “Salt of the Colombian Caribbean,” integrating with cultural and gastronomic tourism, and receiving technical support from institutions like Unimagdalena and SENA.

This strategy would also diversify the local economy: gourmet products, natural cosmetics, medicinal salts, or eco-ethnographic routes could be integrated into an inclusive value chain. Furthermore, salt could be positioned as a pedagogical, identity-based, and ecological tool in a context where the Ciénaga Grande—world heritage and vital ecosystem—needs allies working from sustainability and territorial rootedness.

Of course, the challenges are not minor: improving infrastructure, ensuring fair governance, preventing environmental overexploitation, and guaranteeing equitable distribution of benefits. But these obstacles should not be read as insurmountable barriers, but rather as a natural part of the path toward real innovation—one that Breznitz defines as anchored in everyday life, not in the empty rhetoric of development plans.

Thus, salt ceases to be merely a resource and becomes a symbol. Because transforming a territory also means transforming the narratives through which it has been seen. And if Pueblo Viejo and Sitionuevo succeed in activating this communal and intelligent alchemy, they will have shown that innovation does not always come from silicon, but also from salt.

In the end, what is at stake is not just economic improvement, but cultural affirmation: reclaiming that in these coastal towns there is no backwardness, but potential. That in the salt evaporating under the sun there is no dead past, but a future ready to crystallize. And that yes, from a warm corner of Magdalena, it is possible to teach the world how to make alchemy with salt.