Salting The Earth - Punishing Traitors

Punishing Traitors

In Spain and the Spanish Empire, salt was poured onto the land owned by a convicted traitor (often one who was executed and his head placed on a picota, or pike, afterwards) after his house was demolished.

Likewise, in Portugal, salt was poured onto the land owned by a convicted traitor. The last known event of this sort was the destruction of the Duke of Aveiro's palace in Lisbon in 1759, due to his participation in the Távora affair (a conspiracy against King Joseph I of Portugal). His palace was demolished and his land was salted. A stone memorial now perpetuates the memory of the shame of the Duke, where it is written:

In this place were put to the ground and salted the houses of José Mascarenhas, stripped of the honours of Duque de Aveiro and others.... Put to Justice as one of the leaders of the most barbarous and execrable upheaval that... was committed against the most royal and sacred person of the Lord Joseph I. In this infamous land nothing may be built for all time.

In Portuguese-ruled Brazil, the leader of the Inconfidência Mineira, Tiradentes, was sentenced to death and his house was "razed and salted, so that never again be built up on the floor, ... and even the floor will rise up a standard by which the memory is preserved the infamy of this heinous offender...". He suffered further indignities, being hanged, drawn and quartered, his body parts carried to various parts of the country where his fellow revolutionaries had met, and his children deprived of their property and honor.