TUNA

I didn’t know that ‘Tuna’ was something else than the saltwater fish that I already knew well.
It turns out that the oval red fruit that the cactus produces is also called that way.

So, when I found a place where both elements took place, it became almost a must working on it.

An enclosure built decades ago to place hundreds of fishermen in southern Spain each year during the intense tuna campaign, had now become a kind of ghost town degraded into oblivion after its closure in the sixties.

Ruins surrounded by a wild nature that has been taking all over time.
As if it had rent a place to the human being for a while, but now it’s time to show who is in charge there.

Built in 1929 by El Consorcio Nacional Almadrabero next to an old fishing area of the end of 19th century, El Real de la Almadraba de Nueva Umbría was conceived for catching bluefin tuna.
The seasons were from February to October (including the opening and dismantling work), getting intense from April on, when, from the Atlantic Ocean, the tunas come in platoons in the search of the Estrecho and the Mediterranean Sea to spawn.

The work required of about 210 employees, and, counting their families, more than 900 people lived in that place, becoming the most productive almadraba along the Huelva coast, catching around 250.000 pieces during its more than three decades in service.

But between 1958 and 1960 the work was interrupted due to poor performance, and, after a try of reactivating in 1961, in 1963 the company claimed lack of catches to determine its definitive closure.

Forgotten by the institutions since then, the neglect showed an alarming state of degradation that activated an important neighborhood movement that, in 2014, achieved from de Parliament of Andalucía declaring the place as an Asset of Cultural Interest in 2014.

Soon it became as the usual background of my childhood scenes.
Surrounded by color all around, it was a shocking black and white stain topped off by a tower from where I’m sure a very bad witch was spying on us all.

From the sand, cube and stick in hand, my eyes couldn’t help getting lost in there.
What the hell was that.

I decided it was time to meet as an adult. And since my first visit, got addicted.

I tend to imagine metaphors everywhere, but in this case it was so obvius.
It has been there since my always, every year looks worse, and, in case of continuing this way, the same nature that gave it place will eat it up.

It’s a lovely freak, the guest who comes to the wedding in a tracksuit.
But it beats everyone by possessing a very rare virtue: it owns a sublime silence that I never heard before.

How wrong I was as a child.
It was not there spying; it’s here holding on.
Showing me every year its best scars, like in that scene from ‘Jaws’.

Photos taken between 2014 and 2020