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Home | Sitemap | Turks | Providenciales | Blue Hills | Caicos Cays | Leeward |
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Like Grand Turk, the centre of Salt Cay is dominated by the flat, shallow Salinas that supplied the island's once-thriving salt industry. Recognizing the commercial potential of raking up the salt, the salt traders built stone walls and sluice gates to create smaller ponds so that the water would evaporate more quickly under the baking sun. Windmills were built to speed up the process, but it was fiercely hard manual work scraping the salt into piles. Trading ships from Bermuda carrying limestone rocks as ballast (later used to build the traders' smart houses) then transported the rough salt to trade along the eastern seaboard of the fledgling United States. For centuries, salt was the source of the island's wealth, but the industry was the subject of stiff international competition and went into decline for decades before it finally ground to a halt in the 1960s. Nothing much has happened since, and Salt Cay's population has slowly melted away, the remaining people mostly elderly or children, their numbers supplemented by a trickle of tourists. On the west side of the island, Balfour Town is the principal settlement, home to government buildings, the local school and a couple of stores.
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It's also where you'll find the White House dominating the shoreline, the most spectacular of Salt Cay's two-storey jalousie-windowed limestone houses, built by local salt magnate Joshua Harriot after the great hurricane of 1812 had flattened his wooden home with a 15ft tidal wave. Elsewhere you'll see more recent and pastel-colored wooden houses, with little courtyards and low stone walls to keep stray cattle at bay. The island's best beach runs along the entire north coast, a magnificent swathe of sand, with massive Elkhorn coral heads in a couple of places just offshore harboring schools of fish and perfect for snorkeling. The rocky east coast is dominated by sharp-edged ironshore limestone, with a series of small bays dotted along it. It also has the island's highest point at Taylor's Hill, 60ft above sea level. For divers there are a handful of good sites five minutes by boat off the west coast of the island, where you'll find spotted eagle rays and a wealth of brightly colored fish as well as deep-water gorgonians and black coral trees. Ten miles further south, the encrusted wreck of HMS Endymion, an eighteenth-century British warship complete with cannon, lies in thirty feet of water.
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