This narrow littoral belt is at present home to some 70.000 inhabitants and diverse industry as well as to increasingly expanding transport and tourism. The Slovene coast was known for its salt-pans as early as at the beginning of this century. The first written records about the Piran salt-pans, for which it is not known when they actually began to spring up, date to the second half of the 13th century from the Piran statute, and it must be said that a lot has been written about their historical, technical, technological, ethnological and linguistic traditions. This area thus gave way to the workings of nature, so that the pans, which are composed of a number of diverse and more or less saline biotopes forming a closed ecosystem, have become a rich treasury of the world of plants and animals, the sort which cannot be found anywhere else in Slovenia. The botanical significance of the pans can be underlined by the fact that no less than 45 plant species prosper in this area which have been included in the Red List on Endangered Plant Species in Slovenia.
Some rare vertebrates live in the pans in rather difficult conditions.
The pans, however, are also a natural fish farm, but they are particularly famous as an exceptional ornithological locality, known for its numerous species which breed there, its wintering quarters and as one of the northernmost migratory sites in the Mediterranean. More than 200 bird species occur in the Secovlje salt-pans, and some 90 species breed there permanently. Due to the exceptionally rich natural and cultural heritage as well as with a wish to preserve the pans as a characteristic element of the littoral cultural landscape, the Piran Municipal Assembly passed, in 1989, a decree with which the Secovlje salt-pans were proclaimed a landscape park. Apart from the pans in encloses the Seca peninsula and four somewhat smaller areas which have been due to their botanical and ornithological significance given the status of nature reserves. In October 1992 the Slovene Parliament included, in accordance with Article 2 of the Ramsar Convention, the Secovlje salt-pans on the list of wetlands of international importance, in January 1993 they were officially entered in the list of Ramsar sites.