article · Cini family
The Salt Family of Xwejni
Above Marsalforn, the rectangular salt pans cut into limestone are about to fill for another harvest. The Cini family has worked them for over a hundred years; Josephine Xuereb, fifth-generation, has been taking the helm.
The pans are about to fill.
Drive past Marsalforn on the coast road heading toward Żebbuġ and the cliff drops to a low limestone shelf scored with rectangles. They look engineered, because they are — flat-bottomed pools cut into the rock, knee-high walls between them, the geometry holding all the way to the sea. From the road in early May they are mostly empty: a film of last winter's rainwater in the lower ones, salt-crust along the joins, a few of the higher pans already half-flooded by the spring tides. By the end of the month, if the weather behaves, the work will begin. By July, on the hottest days, the sea will retreat from those rectangles within a week and leave its crystals behind.
This is a working operation. It has been one for more than a hundred years. The family is called Cini, and the public face of the work, the one in most of the photographs that have been taken of the pans over the last twenty years, is Emmanuel. He is the man who sits at the small stall by the side of the road in summer, in the shade of the rock face that the pans are pressed against, weighing out salt into paper bags for whoever stops. Behind him in the cliff is a cave the family uses for storage. Sacks stacked in the dark. Tools. The plastic crates the salt gets shovelled into when it's ready to come up.
The headline now is that the helm has been changing hands. Emmanuel's daughter, Josephine Xuereb, has been taking on more of the operation over the last several years — the fifth generation. She works alongside him through the season. She is the one who has been increasingly described in the press coverage that does exist as the person running the pans, though the handover is not a discrete event so much as a long quiet rolling of responsibility from one set of shoulders onto another. From the road you cannot see this. From the road you see the same man at the same stall, the same sacks, the same paper bags. The transmission is happening at a level the camera doesn't pick up.
There is something specific about taking over a hundred-year operation. It is not the same kind of decision as starting one. A new business owes nothing to its previous shape. An inherited one is a set of inherited equations: the seawater goes in here, the brine flows there, this pan is for first-crop, that one for second, the rake handle is the length it is because it has to clear the wall edge without scraping the bottom, the harvest order through the season is the order it has been for as long as anyone working still remembers. The decisions you can make are inside a structure that was largely settled before you arrived. The work is not invention. The work is custody.
That doesn't make it easy.
The pans at Xwejni are sometimes called the oldest continuously worked salt pans in the Maltese islands, which is the kind of claim that depends on how you draw the boundaries. The Phoenicians produced salt in the Mediterranean. The Romans built pans on this coast. The current rectangular system at Xwejni is broadly attributed to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — limestone is soft enough to cut, the orientation of the shelf catches the prevailing wind, the depth of each pan is shallow enough that the summer sun does the work without machinery. The salt itself is made by the sun and the wind. The family makes the salt by managing how the sun and the wind get at the water.
The mechanics are simpler than the language around them usually suggests. Seawater fills the upper pans on a high tide or is pumped up. It flows by gradient through a sequence of progressively shallower compartments. Each stage concentrates the brine. By the time the water reaches the working pans — the ones the crystals come out of — it is nearly saturated. The sun pulls the last of the water out over a week, sometimes less in true heat. What is left is a flat white field of crystals, and the workers go in with rakes and shovels and lift the salt into piles, then into crates, then up into the cave for drying. The pans are scrubbed, the system reset, the cycle starts again. Through the season — May to September, peak roughly mid-June through July — a single pan can be cropped many times.
Two things come out of this. The bulk product is coarse sea salt, what people fill their kitchen jars with. Bigger, sharper, less uniform than supermarket salt; it tastes more like the sea because it is more like the sea. The other thing is the fine flaky layer that forms on the surface of the brine right before crystallisation finishes — the bit that floats — which is called fleur de sel in French and which the family also collects. The fleur is the gentler product. It melts on the tongue. It costs more because it is rarer per square metre of pan and because the window to lift it is short.
This is not a how-it's-made piece, though, and the New York Times has done that, and so have most of the food magazines that have visited Gozo over the years. The thing that is harder to find written down is what it is like for the family to keep doing this in 2026.
A few facts that point at the harder picture.
Summer in Malta is hotter than it used to be. The seasons are getting longer at both ends and more violent in the middle. A salt operation that depends on solar evaporation is, in the abstract, a beneficiary of heat: more heat, more evaporation, more harvest cycles per season. But that is the abstract. The actual season is more complicated. Heat without wind is less efficient than moderate heat with wind, because the wind is what carries the saturated air away from the surface so fresh dry air can do its work. Heatwaves often coincide with stilled conditions. Brief intense rain — the kind September is starting to deliver — can flush a near-finished pan and undo a week of work. The arithmetic of the season is being rearranged. More yield is theoretically available. More work to capture it is required. The variance, year to year, is widening.
The pans themselves are limestone. Limestone is permeable. The walls between pans are repaired and re-coated every spring with a mix that has been adjusted across generations to handle the specific brine and weather conditions of this shelf. The seawater off this stretch of coast is what it is. Plastic from the wider Mediterranean has, by all accounts, been showing up in trace levels in coastal salts globally; the family at Xwejni handles this with the only thing that can be done — by visual sorting at the lift, by the cleanness of the pan, by knowing which days to crop and which to wait on. Nobody talks about it in marketing copy. It is part of the operation.
The economic frame is also worth naming. Hand-collected sea salt is a small-volume, high-touch product. The market for it is people who care enough to pay several times what industrial salt costs. That market exists — Gozitan sea salt has wholesale customers, gets shipped, ends up in restaurants — but it is sensitive. A bad season hurts directly. Tourism brings the retail business: the cars that pull over on the coast road, the people who walk down from Marsalforn for the photograph and end up with a small bag of salt to take home. That part of the business depends on the same flow of visitors the rest of Gozo's tourism economy does, with the same exposures. Salt does not pay the family a salary. Salt is part of a wider household that includes other work, other roles, other forms of income.
So the inheritance question is not romantic. To take over the pans at Xwejni in 2026 is to take over a set of physical structures that need maintenance every year, a set of seasonal practices that take a long time to learn well, a small retail business that depends on weather and tourist flow, and a public-face role — the photograph at the side of the road — that comes with the territory. It is to do this in your thirties or forties, as a fifth-generation woman in a profession that has overwhelmingly been male in the public-facing image, in a year where the climate variables are doing things they didn't used to do. It is, also, to do it because the family has done it for more than a hundred years and there is no version of the future in which Josephine wakes up one morning and is not from a salt family.
The handover, in other words, is not a costume change. It is the same work, by the next person, under conditions that have shifted.
What is photographable about Xwejni — and the place gets photographed constantly — is the geometry. Drone shots love it. The orthogonal pans, the grey-green water, the white salt crust at the edges, the cliff face behind, the sea beyond the cliff. It looks like a graphic. It also looks, in those photographs, static.
It is not static. Walk the pans at six in the morning in late June and you will hear scraping. A pan that was full of brine three days before will be a white field by Wednesday and will need to be lifted before the heat of the afternoon makes the salt clump. There are people with shovels. There is a rhythm. The salt is moved into low piles to drain, then into containers, then up the slope into the cave. Someone is repairing a wall. Someone is moving brine from one pan into another with a hand pump. Someone has a radio. Through the day, depending on the temperature, the pans pass through stages — the colour of the brine deepens, the surface dries to a film, the film breaks into a salt skin, the skin thickens. By evening, in the heat of July, a pan that was watery at sunrise can be ready to crop.
The smell is its own thing. Evaporating brine is not the same as the sea. It is more concentrated, more mineral, slightly metallic, slightly warm. Standing among the pans in the middle of the day in summer your nose recalibrates to it. After an hour you stop noticing it. After three hours, when you leave, your clothes carry it for the rest of the day.
The salt that comes out of the cave is not uniform. There is the coarse crop the family bags for the road stall. There is the fleur for the kitchens that ask for it. There is a slightly grey product from a particular pan section where the limestone bleeds a mineral tint into the brine and which a few chefs specifically request. Different pans behave differently. The family knows which is which. That knowledge does not exist in a document. It lives in the people who have spent enough seasons here to read each rectangle and what it will do this year.
This is the inheritance, more than the title to the land or the share of the season's takings. Josephine has been learning to read the pans. There is no manual. The transmission happens in the doing.
The piece doesn't end on a note about preservation, because the language of preservation makes things smaller than they are. It implies that what is happening at Xwejni is precarious, fragile, in need of saving, slightly elegiac. None of that is right. The operation is working. The harvest is about to start. There is one family in the cliff above the pans, the same one, doing the same thing, with the next generation already several years deep into the work.
What is true is that the conditions have changed. The summers are hotter and stranger. The market is what it is. The visitors come. The salt fills the bags. Emmanuel sits at the stall some days; Josephine runs more of the operation than she used to. Whoever drives the coast road in July and pulls over for a paper bag of salt is buying from a working business that has been a working business since their grandparents' grandparents were young.
The pans are about to fill. The first crop, weather permitting, will come up before the end of May, with the bigger lifts coming through June and July when the sun does its real work. Anyone who drives that road in the next four months will see the rectangles move from emptiness to water to crystal to harvest and back again, a few times over. The cycle has been going for as long as anyone alive remembers, and the geometry was cut into the limestone long before that.
The people doing it are a family. That part is not metaphorical. That part is the operation itself.
From secondary research, May 2026. The Cini family was not interviewed for this piece; future versions will draw on in-person reporting.