Urices

"Your uncle had such a good time, with his diving suit and rifle," my aunt says. "Now he wouldn't fish even with a rod. He's seen how the sea has been emptied of fish, and he thinks it's a crime."

I agree with him, though I'm still grateful for the times my uncle would show up at our house around this time of year with a sack of freshly harvested sea urchins dripping with seawater. With special scissors, we'd split the urchins in two; the spine and rind would crackle as they broke apart. We'd throw away the top half and, with a swift motion, empty the animal's digestive system. We'd eat the urchins outside, under the winter sun. The pale light allowed us to savor the bluish-black of the spines, which still moved in the palm of our hand, fragile yet hard, like ceramic, while with a small spoon we'd scoop out the star-shaped strips from the urchin's small natural cavity. We'd eat them with bread.

Nothing is more delicious and brimming with the sea than sea urchins. They're eaten raw, and it's a sin to add anything like some restaurants do. Their gelatinous texture can be more or less granular, and they melt in your mouth like a fresh, thick, and refined meaty cream, with the flavor of seaweed, crustaceans, and sea salt. Once, I myself went down to a difficult-to-reach corner of Cala Urgell to find them for New Year's Eve dinner, wading through the water up to my waist, at sunset. They were already selling them at the fish market, but everything is so much better when you harvest them yourself.

"They keep bringing me smaller ones," the fishmonger tells me when I ask her why there are fewer and I say, "I don't think I'm going to end up catching any." In recent years, the sea bream has been overfished without restraint, like everything else tourism touches. It's been promoted in wild settings while, hypocritically, fishing for it has been restricted. You see fewer and fewer of them underwater, and they're smaller. These animals can live up to twenty years. The same thing has happened with octopuses; all summer long, going underwater every day, I haven't seen a single one. My uncle is absolutely right.

Now, an unknown pandemic has caused the mass death of the Canary Islands sea urchin, which is rapidly disappearing. This could happen to the sea urchin here, just as it happened to the mother-of-pearl between 2017 and 2018, which vanished completely in a few months. Starting with the word itself, the relationship of the local people with the sea urchin is as intimate as the animal itself, as close as having eaten it. If the sea urchins die, it will be as if we were tearing them from the very depths of our being.