The Salt Mountain: A Landscape Action

Julia Grosinger

Aug, 2026

MUSIC:

Situating

When travelling from Barcelona into inland Catalonia along the C16 highway, one cannot help but notice an utterly surrealist landscape element appearing in the left window. An oversized, white-shining mountain suddenly towers over the otherwise coherent view of reddish, seemingly abandoned crops, covered by Mediterranean shrubs and forest, interspersed with more or less ancient pine stands. This white-bright unexpectedness recalls less a natural formation, and more an impressive piece of land art by a young aspiring artist with an absurdly generous budget behind them.

When I first encountered it, I did not yet understand how this strange light-coloured intrusion condensed so many of the tensions shaping the Catalan countryside: the legacies of extractive industry, the contamination of water and soil and the linkages to the steadily ongoing destruction of livable environments in the Middle East. Over time, I came to see this human artefact as a biophysical manifestation of what the very concept of polycrisis captures: not a single crisis unfolding in isolation, but multiple crises converging, interacting, and amplifying one another across seemingly disparate territories.

Photo_ Resalado_ CC BY-SA 4.0

The term “salt mountain” is not a romanticising allegory; it is indeed an enormous pile of sodium chloride, the same basic compound as ordinary table salt, accumulated over more than a century of mining. The mountain, now an unavoidable landscape feature, is the saline waste product of the Sallent potash mine. Potash, a potassium-rich salt mainly used as an agricultural fertiliser, began being extracted here in the 1930s as part of the industrialisation of Catalonia. Today, the waste deposit reaches 515 meters above sea level, far above the neighbouring—and natural—Cogulló de Sallent mountain. It covers approximately 48 hectares and weighs an estimated 40 million tons Less visible, but no less worrying than the mountain itself, is its hydrological legacy. Rainfall and runoff around it turn into saline flows that enter groundwater systems and even the Llobregat river basin, affecting wells, springs, and aquifers across the region. After two decades of litigation, the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) ruled again in 2026 in favour of a residents’ association, confirming the liability of the current owner, ICL Israel Chemicals Ltd., for environmental restoration

The extraction of minerals and metals connects rural soils, subsoils, waters, and infrastructure to distant industrial demands, making even seemingly peripheral landscapes integral to global circuits of production, and consumption.

The salt mountain is a particularly obvious manifestation of the kind of extraction experienced in rural landscapes. The fact of the matter is, landscapes are not merely biophysical, neutral conditions. Even the most consensual and seemingly uncontroversial definition of landscape—as “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors” —already emphasises their subjective and relational character. Landscapes retain the memories and traces of how societies have interacted with and across their surroundings. They tell stories of suppression, hegemony, and power. They hold signs of everyday routines and desires, but also of the larger structures of power within which these practices unfold. Today, one of the most powerful of these structures is the imperative of economic growth, practised via the expansion, accumulation, liberalisation, and consequently, monopolisation of capital across the planet Whatever their isolation, rural landscapes are deeply and inevitably embedded in this global system. They are never simply “local”: fields, forests, village roads, abandoned farms, and salt mountains alike are entangled with distant markets, interests, property regimes, and global processes of supply chain management.

Moreover, the hyper-intensive production system leaves very visible traces in landscapes. This system is as ever-present as it is placeless, as it can hardly be described as a space; but it manifests itself in rural landscapes through green-growth urbanism, agro-industrial expansion, land grabbing, tourism, and mineral extraction. These processes connect seemingly local environments to distant production and consumption schemes. Agro-industrial systems, for example, link soils and water to international livestock production and feed chains, integrating complex ecological relations into increasingly standardised, global production systems. Tourism similarly connects rural landscapes to external populations, capital, and desires for an “authentic” countryside, reshaping land markets, housing, infrastructure, and expectations of place. For its part, the extraction of minerals and metals connects rural soils, subsoils, waters, and infrastructure to distant industrial demands, making even seemingly peripheral landscapes integral to global circuits of extraction, production, and consumption.

The white mountain of Sallent is therefore not simply a local environmental problem, or even a monument to ecological damage, corroded homes, salinised groundwater and rivers. In all its whiteness, it also speaks to wider social and political challenges. It is a landscape produced through relations that reach far beyond Sallent itself. What I initially read as an isolated environmental scar was also connected to a much vaster and more entrenched political geography of the legacies of extractive industry, including, as I said, the worldwide contamination of water and soil, but also, specifically, the ongoing, meticulously carried-out destruction of life in the Middle East. A region, let us remember, whose fragility the West often observes with raised eyebrows. As if it were somehow surprising that peace remains elusive in a place repeatedly subjected to bombardment, displacement and infrastructural destruction.

Relating

The familiar notion of the “global village” may carry an unintended irony: a metaphor for an increasingly interconnected world retains the image of a rural community at its centre.

Rural areas are undisputedly crucial to human survival. They provide the material basis for food production, resource extraction, habitation, and the functioning of ecological systems on which urban and rural populations alike depend. They cover around 60% of the terrestrial surface, yet, strangely, their significance is often rendered invisible by an urban-centred understanding of the world. The Sallent salt mountain sheds light on something easily obscured when we imagine rural areas as peripheral, hinterlands or places just left behind. In this sense, the familiar notion of the “global village” may carry an unintended irony: a metaphor for an increasingly interconnected world retains the image of a rural community at its centre. As much as the village may be imagined as isolated and backward, the material relations that sustain the global system remain deeply rural.

Rural landscapes are all but watertight containers. They are porous and relational, connected, as I said, to distant places through flows of capital, materials, people, resources, and decisions. As the human geographer Doreen Massey reminds us, these places can be understood as an open and continually evolving constellation of social, economic, political, and material relations rather than as static remnants. Landscapes are shaped through connections to elsewhere while simultaneously shaping what happens elsewhere [5].[5] Massey, D. (2013). Space, place and gender. John Wiley & Sons. What appears as a local landscape can therefore be read as a particular spatial and visual expression of relations operating across multiple scales. The local is not the opposite of the global, but one of its constituting dimensions—and therefore one of the spaces where the global can be renegotiated. The landscape becomes, in this sense, a situated space of action: a place from which distant relations can be made visible, their consequences experienced, and their organisation potentially contested and reorganised.

In times of polycrisis, this relational understanding of landscape becomes particularly consequential. Climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, social inequalities and warfare do not unfold as separate crises in separate places. They intersect through the very material, economic and political relations that connect places across scales. A landscape may manifest the consequences of decisions made elsewhere while simultaneously contributing to processes whose effects are felt far beyond its boundaries. What is at stake is not only how to manage the consequences of multiple crises, but how to reorganise the relations through which they are (re)produced. Landscapes reveal a peculiar geography of growth: one place can absorb the material and ecological consequences of relations and ramifications whose drivers lay elsewhere. Sallent makes this geography almost impossible to ignore. Truly addressing these impacts, thus, demands overhauling our very notions of growth and progress.

The local is not the opposite of the global, but one of its constituting dimensions—and therefore one of the spaces where the global can be renegotiated.

As a notion, post-growth refers to the wide range of approaches currently seeking to organise economies around the notion of a meaningful existence within ecological limits, rather than around the pursuit of economic growth From a relational point of view, this cannot mean simply replacing materials and energy sources. Replacing coal with solar panels, fossil-fuel cars with electric vehicles, or one extractive resource with another does not necessarily alter the relations that organise production and consumption. A system can become “greener” without changing in a meaningful way. In fact, superficial “greening” has very much become an incentive to disguise and perpetuate unsustainable extraction. Corporate sustainability reports of corporations such as Lockheed Martin, for example, can readily accommodate the language of green growth: emissions can be reduced, technologies made more efficient, and energy sources replaced while the underlying relations of production, and their ultimate impacts, remain largely unquestioned. Post-growth thinking, instead, requires questioning the kinds of relations that make particular forms of production seem necessary in the first place

This is where landscape becomes politically significant. Because landscapes materialise relations between people, institutions, infrastructures, resources, and distant territories, they allow us to really see what would otherwise remain abstract. The salt mountain of Sallent is not only evidence of a particular material process—potash extraction. It is the visible outcome of a much broader hegemonic productivist regime, whose social, political, and ecological costs are unevenly displaced across territories. Changing that landscape therefore cannot mean simply finding a less damaging way of producing the same commodity. It requires questioning the relations that made the mountain possible in the first place.

Intervening

Capital travels fast. Resistance can make it stop.

In April 2026, something changed at the salt mountain. For three days, from 17 to 19 April, the disruptive social movement “Revoltes de la Terra”, together with Boicot ICL, local environmental movements, farmers, trade unionists, and organisations in solidarity with Palestine, mobilised around the mines of Sallent and Súria. The Boycott campaign against ICL, which is part of the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), explicitly tied the environmental and territorial impacts of ICL’s activities in the Bages district with the company’s wider economic and political relations in Israel, bringing those relations into the landscape itself.

A system can become “greener” without changing in a meaningful way. In fact, superficial “greening” has very much become an incentive to disguise and perpetuate unsustainable extraction.

This mobilisation dared to occupy the landscape itself. The landscape is often considered a backdrop or discreet scenery, but in this context, an otherwise uninhabited one became a core part of a political struggle. Around one thousand people climbed the salt waste mountain and formed the words PROU SAL—enough salt—on its summit with their bodies. Simultaneously, another group occupied and dismantled sections of the railway used to transport ICL’s potash to the port of Barcelona, temporarily interrupting the movement of the mineral out of the territory. Others slowed traffic on the C-16 and C-25 roads The intervention strategically followed the very infrastructures that connect the landscape to elsewhere. The salt mountain, the river, the railway, the port, and the corporation ceased to appear as separate objects. They became visible as parts of the same material relation. The mine itself was now perceived and addressed not simply as a local employer or industrial site, but as one node within a wider corporate network.

The point was not to collapse two very different forms of violence—local and environmental, international and military—into a single problem, but to reject the idea that they belong to separate political worlds. The campaign followed the relations between them: corporate ownership, extraction, infrastructure, capital, and the circulation of materials across territories. What conventional maps tend to separate, the action attempted to reconnect. ICL’s operations in Catalonia thus appeared not simply as local industrial activity, but as part of a wider corporate network deeply embedded in Israel’s socio-military complex.

There is something almost Magic-Mountain-like in the way rural landscapes are imagined as places apart: elevated, distant, slower, somehow removed from the contradictions of the world below. In Thomas Mann’s opus, however, the mountain is never truly outside history. Sallent offers a very different kind of mountain, but a similar reversal of perspective. Its enormous white pile of salt may appear to stand apart from the world, yet it is the accumulated material trace of relations extending far beyond the mountain itself. This characteristic mountain does not extricate Sallent from the world; on the contrary, it reveals how deeply the place is already entangled with it. Rural landscapes are where resources are extracted, infrastructures built, water appropriated, waste deposited, and the consequences of distant decisions inscribed in soil, rivers, and bodies. Late capitalism has accumulated not only wealth, but wastelands.

Photo_ Jon Feinstein_ CC BY 2.0

War and genocide have a geography. They require territory, energy, minerals, logistics, and labour. Landscapes themselves become targets through the destruction of homes, agricultural land, and water infrastructure. At the same time, they can also become instruments through which life is displaced, restricted, or made increasingly uninhabitable. In this sense, violence does not simply occur in landscapes; it acts upon the material relations through which landscapes are made and inhabited. The slogan of the mobilisation—“Ni sang a Palestina, ni sal al Llobregat”—made this connection explicit: no blood in Palestine, no salt in the Llobregat.

War and genocide have a geography. They require territory, energy, minerals, logistics, and labour.

The mobilisation offers a concrete way of thinking about living in a global village from a post-growth perspective. It does not reject connection or interdependence; rather, it asks what kinds of connections are being produced, who benefits from them, and where their costs are borne. Its demand is not simply to replace one mine with another, cleaner industry, or to make extraction more efficient. The salt mountain becomes one place from which to gaze into the horizon, reading a much larger landscape—one in which local extraction and the erasure of places like Palestine are materially connected, despite the geographical distance between them. And precisely because these relations become visible in the landscape, the landscape also becomes a place from which to contest them.

Landscapes are relational. The question is not whether they are connected to the world, but whether we can learn to see where those connections run—and where they can be interrupted. We are connected by materials, infrastructures, capital, and labour, yet divided by the borders and distances that make these relations difficult to see. The task of acting through landscape is to make life worth living.

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