The salmon of Asturias

Latitude: 43.3484650 Length: -5.1325464
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In the 18th century, during the fishing season, more than 12.000 salmon were caught in the Sella River alone.At the Benedictine monastery of San Pedro de Villanueva in Cangas de Onís, local residents who worked for the monks went so far as to demand that salmon be served only twice a week. Similar conditions were imposed by laborers working in other riverside towns such as Pravia, Pola de Laviana, and Cangas del Narcea.

In the village of Pravia we can see up close a reproduction of 400 kilos of weight of an old salmon fishing machine. Although now strictly prohibited, at the time it was raging on the banks of Narcea. The armatroste in question, designed by the Frenchman Martín Duhart in 1865, is a giant mechanism that consists of several blades and that in its moment it took out the salmon in mass of the water.

With a salmon past of such magnitude, it is not surprising that the fishing of this species continues to be an annual event in the Principality. The expectation is huge throughout the season, especially when the starting gun is given. In the month of March begins the hunt and capture of the popular Campanu, the first salmon of the year. Throughout the campaign, the passage of time is recorded in pieces and feats, raffles, fishing grounds, baits used ... good and bad leg.

The season ends in the middle or end of July. Generally, the salmon fishing authorization is limited to the main river beds: Eo, Porcía, Navia, Narcea, Nalón, Sella, Cares, Deva and the Esva.

The gradual shortage of catches seems to hit bottom in the 90 years of the twentieth century. 1997 barely exceeded the exemplary 700 throughout the autonomous community. However, 2001 was breaking a record of recent history, reaching the not insignificant number of 2.779 pieces. In Asturias salmon are currently caught more than in the rest of the Iberian Peninsula.

The improvement in the water quality of Asturian rivers, some regulation of salmon fishing in the open sea, and, above all, restocking with fingerlings, are the reasons attributed to this gradual recovery. If things continue this way, it's reasonable to expect that salmon cuisine will gradually become more accessible to a wider audience.

Currently, the Campanu (first salmon of the season) fetches a very high price.exceeding one million pesetas, and is usually acquired by famous restaurants from the capital of Spain to invite great personalities of social, political or sports life of our country.

To make Asturian salmon more affordable and accessible to more people, we must continue to advance with sustainability criteria. A good example is the Sella River, which, according to the most recent technical studies, is the best salmon river in Spain. The Caño salmon hatchery (in Cangas de Onís) has become the natural laboratory for Asturian salmon. Thanks to its work, tens of thousands of native salmon fry are released into the Sella every year.

The tagging and subsequent tracking of the pups allows us to confirm the return of many of them as adults, after their time at sea. The artificial breeding and spawning practices carried out in other parts of Asturias also yield results. more than half a million annual fry, with which to repopulate all the salmon basins of the region.

If we focus on the particular history of these salmonids, we will not cease to be surprised by the life they suffer so long as they perpetuate themselves. Climb the rivers and reproduce It is one and the same: an eternal return, the search for the origin, the end of its existence. The Atlantic salmon, or salmon salar, which is the one we find in the Principality, only swims upriver when it reaches a large size, up to a meter in length and a little over 15 kg in weight. Its body is slender, its flanks silvery, and its back metallic blue, covered with dark spots.

After fecundation, the high temperatures of the Asturian rivers allow a rapid development of the fry. At the end of its first summer of life it can reach from 8 to 10 cm in length. During your stay in the rivers, one or two years, they are cannon fodder for otters, fishing birds, large trout and even their own congeners, which significantly reduces the numbers. The first or second spring arrives and deep morphological and physiological changes occur in them, as they prepare to make the leap to the living conditions of the marine waters.

Already in the sea they live in remote areas, in cold and nutrient-rich areas. Salmon from the Atlantic coast are concentrated south of Greenland. There they spend one, two or three years. After this stage, they return as prodigal sons to their rivers to procreate. And so, these survivors, unparalleled travelers and hardened nostalgics, return to their land in the foreseen time, as if they had in their heads all the oceanic cartography and an infallible agenda.

Back to the river they can no longer feed themselves ... their metabolism has adapted to the marine diet and they must survive on the accumulated reserves. If no fisherman can remedy it, the process of going up the river and reproducing will be exhausting for beings unable to feed themselves. Therefore, the salmon already spawned, strides, they remain scarcely without energy reserves, many of them even dying, waiting for the spring floods to drag them back to the sea they begin to miss.