I suppose that you would describe Tavira as a tourist town now but until only fairly recently it had a thriving fishing industry and infrastructure to support it. Tuna and sardine fishing were important industries but they have gone now and the once busy processing factories are disused, abandoned, crumbling and falling down.
True of much of the Algarve I suppose, when I first visited in 1984 the beaches in Faro and Albufeira were busy with fishing boat activity but not any more and almost any suggestion of them is now replaced by sun loungers and beach bars.
Fishing remains a major economic activity in Portugal because the Portuguese people eat more fish per head than any other people in mainland Europe. In recognition of this achievement it has been granted an 'Exclusive Economic Zone', which is a sea area in the Atlantic Ocean over which the Portuguese have special rights in respect of exploration and use of marine resources.
The Portuguese may eat a lot of fish but not I suspect from places like this, more likely caught and processed in massive factory trawlers operating hundreds of miles away in the North Atlantic because the small fishing boat fleets cannot possibly provide the estimated sixty kilograms of fish eaten by the average Portuguese every year.
One of the reasons for decline was that the fish simply stopped coming. In the first half of the twentieth century sardine and tuna came by twice a year as they migrated from the Mediterranean in Spring on their way to feeding grounds in the Atlantic and then returning along the same route in the Autumn. This was a lucrative industry but in the 1050s and 1960s it began to fall into decline. I am tempted to think that maybe the fish got wise to the danger and being caught, killed and canned and found an alternative safer route for their journey not so close to the coastline. Cleverer than we thought perhaps?
Close to Tavira is Barril beach, a perfect spot for tourists and beach lovers with miles of perfect sand and an excitable tumbling surf but up until 1964 this was the summer home of the tuna fishermen and their families. They lived in small cottages adjacent to workshops and store rooms.
They used a method of fishing brought to Portugal by the Phoenicians, who settled here around 1200 BC and invented the fishing technique called Almadraba to catch tuna and other large fish.
The technique involves laying a maze of wooden frames covered with netting in the path that the migrating tuna are likely to take. These wooden frames need to stand firm against the ocean currents as well as against the wild thrashing of the caught tunas. To accomplish this, the fishermen secured the frames with hundreds of anchors, cables, and buoys. The enclosed paths guide the tuna into a central area. Once the tuna are gathered there, the boats close in and block the paths. The largest fish are then caught by their tails and hauled onto the boats and (no easy way of saying it - slaughtered).
It must have been a brutal procedure. Growing up as a boy I always believed that fish were cold blooded and felt no pain. One day I was fishing in the canal and I stopped believing that. I caught a fish, a perch I think and if lay there on the bank it looked terrified and was clearly distressed. I removed the hook, put it back in the water, packed up my gear and never went fishing again
From the car park we travelled to Barril beach on a small train which takes visitor now but was once used to transport the fish from the fishing village to a distribution centre and onwards then for processing.
There is an interesting little museum in the ex-fishing village and some informative display boards with old photographs and explanations and next to it in the sand dunes at the back of the beach is a collection of rusted anchors.
This is O Cemitério das Âncoras (The Anchor Cemetery). A memorial to a now-defunct trade going back hundreds of years. In 1964, the local community decided to commemorate the death of traditional Bluefin Tuna fishing by burying the anchors that once formed the backbone of the complex tuna traps known as armações. They've remained there ever since as a reminder of a different type of fishing to what will be found now and in the future.
It had been a good day so far, a nice beach walk (Sunday Times Travel includes it in a list of the Top Ten beaches of Portugal), a heritage museum (I like a heritage site) and a train ride (Mike likes a train ride).
We wanted somewhere to eat now but we baulked at the prices in the Barril Beach tavernas so we left, took the train back and moved on to nearby Santa Luzia but we had left it a bit late and all the tempting places were closing up for the afternoon, so after a brief walk around (there wasn't a great deal to see) and then returned to Tavira.
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