“How can anyone put it? One thing is certain – here we have always been and here, whatever happens, we shall remain, listening to the voices of the old sea.” – Norman Lewis
Everywhere in Portugal there is celebration of fishermen and women.
The reason that fishing is such a major economic activity in Portugal is because the Portuguese people eat an awful lot of fish. It has the highest per capita fish and seafood consumption in Europe – analysis reveals that the Portuguese consume almost 50kg per person every year.
Spain is second but a long way behind at about 30kgs. Surprisingly for an island which keeps going on about how important fishing is to the economy the UK can only manage 13kg, Germans eat a lot of strange things but only 9kg of fish, which is just about the same as Australians and the US and Canada are down at only 5kg and most of that is shrimp,
To be fair however a lot of Australia, Canada and the USA is a long way from the sea.
At only one hundred and fifteen miles Miranda do Douro on the Spanish border is the Portuguese town furthest from the sea. In the USA Lebanon in Kansas (the geographical centre of the country) is six hundred miles from the Gulf of Mexico, in Canada Calgary is three hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean and in Australia Alice Springs is about five hundred miles from the Gulf of Carpentaria so I guess the supply of fresh fish from the coast can sometimes be a bit of a problem.
Traditional fishing methods have declined since Portugal joined the European Union, I took this picture in 1984 on the beach somewhere on the Algarve…
And this is me discussing the catch of the day with a local fisherman in Praia de Luz in 1994…
Have Bag, Will Travel 
Vey informative post. I didn’t know about that. Thanks.
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Thanks. Lots of information and statistics about fishing and almost everything else at the Eurostat webpage – http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/fisheries/data/database
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Thanks for sharing the link.
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You are looking most animated in your discussion with the fisherman, Andrew!
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I think I might have reached the point where you give up trying to understand the spoken and resort to sign language instead!
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😀😀 I know the feeling well!!
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Sad how much of the traditional methods have disappeared, at one time they were actively discouraging them from using traditional boats. Now they are having to place limits on what can be fished as a result!
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Thanks to the EU Countries don’t catch their own fish anymore, they rely on the European wide fishing industry. A lot of fish for Portugal comes from the Spanish trawler fleet out of Galicia and also from German and Dutch factory ships. I was talking to a couple of men in Póvoa de Varzim who were fishermen, they don’t work out of Póvoa anymore but out of Rotterdam – three weeks at sea, one week at home.
Grimsby, where I live, was once the biggest fishing port in the World but now all of the fish for processing there comes from Iceland!
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didn’t realise this – in Olhao it feels there are still local fisherman
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In Póvoa there were still fishing boats but not on the modern industrial scale!
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This is bizarre, isn’t it?
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Some people call it progress!
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Who wears short shorts?
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I believe it was the fashion 25 years ago, a bit like footballers!
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I so enjoyed this post!
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Thank you, I appreciate that!
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Liked the post, a great slant on fishing. I love fishing ports too. The UK would be higher up the fish league if you weighed the batter too!
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Good point Wil, sometimes fish shops give a very generous portion of batter here in Grimsby!
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Great set of photos to go with your post on fishing, Andrew. Appropriate for us today, given that we are spending a week at Rockaway Beach on the Oregon Coast. Our room overlooks the ocean and the waves are crashing in. Soon we will be off to a lunch of Calamari. –Curt
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Can’t get better than a calamari lunch Curt. All of those pictures were snatched on the streets or sometimes from pictures in shops and restaurants. Hope you are having a great time!
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Happy tummies after lunch. Major storm brewing off coast. Should be interesting. Maybe some calamari will be delivered to our doorstep. 🙂
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I was in France 44 years ago – before EU. I couldn’t purchase a fish from a fisherman in the very south of France because it all had to go in a truck to the fish market in Paris and then all the way back to the fish monger.
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Sounds like you were unlucky. Today local markets will sell fish or anything else to anyone prepared to put their hand in their pocket!
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We still have some local commercial fishing, but a whole lot of it seems geared to sports fishing.
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I bet you get a lot of Alaskan Pollock?
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Fascinating, I loved those fishing boats and could visualize them putting to sea with the strong me to guide them. Beautiful.
As a young boy, in England during WWII, fish became the mainstay of our diet. Meat was somewhat scarce as a result I am still more inclined to eat fish than meat,
I really don’t enjoy meat that much, I smack my chops when fish is on the table.
It doesn’t surprise me that the English,in England eat very little of it now, they don’t have to depend on it.
It never cease to amaze m,e the courage of the men who went to sea, to fish and to keep us fedm during the war. yet I have never seen anything to commemorate them and their deeds.
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Here in Grimsby the fishermen are still remembered and commemorated. There is a large statue in the town centre.
Interestingly, judged in terms of % of fatalities, fishing even up to the 1960s was statistically the most dangerous job in the World.
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I can believe that!
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strong man not strong me, I’m anything but 🙂
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Nice . . . but why were you carrying a bedpan?
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When times are hard certain household items have alternative uses!
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I like that big chap with the net slung over his shoulder, Andrew. Where did you find him? I had beer battered cod with mushy peas in Durham yesterday (at the Lumiere event) and some superb fish whilst I was in the Algarve. Not crazy about heads and bones but I’m getting there. When in Rome… 🙂 🙂
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The big guy was a wall painting outside a restaurant in Ovar.
Interestingly in Grimsby people won’t eat cod, it has to be haddock. They say cod is a dirty fish because it is a bottom feeder. I wonder though if it has something to do with the Cod Wars with Iceland which more or less wiped out the fishing industry in the town.
I don’t mind heads and tails – just cut them off!
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