The last fishermen of Estartit: "In another life I would return to the sea"

EstartitAnita Prats Pibernos and Pere Parrí Llos, aged 91 and 93 respectively, are two of the last residents of Estartit who have worked as fishermen. They represent the last generation of a town that lived from the sea, in conditions that were nothing like those of today, when boats were made of wood, barely propelled by the first combustion engines. L'Estartit was a small town of humble houses facing the Medes Islands, without a dock or breakwater, before the great urban transformation by the tourism boom of the 1960s and 1970s.

"The house was on the seashore, when the sea was rough the waves would chop up and to get down to the boat we had a ladder that came directly from the door," recalls Prats, the daughter of seven generations of fishermen, who as a child already worked on her father's longline boat, when she still couldn't distinguish the bow from the prow of the salting factory, doing double shifts to earn four reales. Pere Parrí also started sailing at sea at a very young age: after mowing he would have lunch in his grandfather's field with the scythe. At 15 he was already a skipper of the cobweb (or hoop) and went out to catch fish. "It was a very hard life, but we caught everything: cuttlefish, redfish, lean fish, mullet, sardines, anchovies and mackerel," she recalls.

Anita Prats and Pere Parrí are a wealth of anecdotes, experiences, and popular wisdom: oral testimonies of the living history of trades that, despite the passage of time, define the life and identity of the people of the Costa Brava. Before their history falls into oblivion, the new Espai Medes in l'Estartit, a marine interpretation center in the Montgrí Natural Park, has launched a project to recover and disseminate the memory of all these testimonies from the fishing world. The initiative, called La Llongada, is carried out in collaboration with the Museum of the Mediterranean and is coordinated by the young anthropologist from Estartit, Maria Ribas, who for six months has collected information and interviewed half a dozen valuable voices.

In fact, this project will produce a documentary, which will be presented on November 7th, and various resources, forums, and talks will be organized to disseminate this intangible heritage. "Other towns, such as Palamós or L'Escala, have been doing this work for years. Here we arrived late, but we arrived just in time. The fishing heritage has been relegated to the background because tourism has invaded everything, but the goal is to recognize that L'Estartit also has a very powerful history of fishermen that must be honored," explains Toni Roviras, director of Espa.

Furthermore, when talking about the world of fishing, people often think only of strong men, braved by the wind and salt, but women were also key figures in the sea. For this reason, Ribas explains that she wanted to keep the gender perspective in mind when conducting the research. "Women were very important. They worked in salting factories to preserve the fish or as fertilizer spreaders, patching nets on the beach to catch fish," the anthropologist explains.

Selling fish around the farmhouses on a bicycle

Former fishermen and women over 90 years old remember the past with emotion and nostalgia, but also with a deep wound from many years of hardship. "We were very poor. There were winters of bad weather when we spent entire days without being able to go out to sea. We dragged the boats right up to the houses, and my mother, crying, told me I should help her bring food home," recalls Anita Prats, whose moments still remain etched in her memory. "I went to the farmhouses to sell cuttlefish. Once I couldn't sell them, and I cycled to Parlavà to try to sell them, a very long way away. When I returned, my parents burst into tears for what I had done," she recounts.

In L'Estartit, you had to go door-to-door to sell fish because there was no market; only occasionally were the parolas of sardines auctioned by voice in the square. "In the houses, we weren't paid in cents, but rather through an exchange of other food items," says Pere Parrí. He adds: "There was a great sense of community and of helping each other among neighbors. Now in Estartit, you don't know anyone, whereas before, when you needed something or were in trouble, everyone would lend a hand."

Tourists walking on fish boxes

With tourism, everything changed. Most of the fishing boats became boats for foreign passengers and tourist routes. Women like Anita left the salting factory to work as waitresses, in hotels, and rent rooms, though they never lost their passion for nets and fish. "My husband, when tourism started, carried visitors on top of crates of fish. However, he always said he'd rather earn a penny fishing than four carrying tourists. He never liked it," Prats admits.

Instead, Pere acted as a maneuver and set up a company in the sector. In the 1980s, he was the first captain of the Nautilus, the glass-bottom boat that goes out to show off the rich seabed of the Medes. Until he got tired of it and returned to his original work. "I went back to fishing. I bought a small boat and trammel nets and went back to fishing for cuttlefish," he says. Now this boat is the one used by the Renowned amateur meteorologist Josep Pascual to measure the water temperature every day.

"It has no future, but the sea is within us."

And what is the omen for that increasingly depopulated profession, marked by closed season restrictions, European regulations, the depletion of the seabed, and the importation of fish from abroad at lower prices? "It will disappear. The new generations starting out will be able to dedicate some time to it, but I always tell them they won't retire," laments Parrí. However, the fisherman acknowledges that, in another life, he would return to the sea. "We have it in us; these are jobs full of nature, very free, and no one pisses you off. Even now, when I get up every morning, the first thing I do is look at the sea. I look at the gregal, the garbí, the tramontana, or the fog, and they tell me what the weather will be like," he concludes.