Maríscadoras: shellfish women of Galicia
- gcallah2
- Dec 14, 2022
- 6 min read
It’s nearly 7 am when they begin to gather at the shore. The sun won’t rise above the hills for another two hours at least, but the moon is full, and they come prepared with headlamps and warm layers. Glowing towns twinkle across the bay, gulls caw, and the damp December air hangs cold and heavy with ocean mist.
There are around 60 fisherfolk, mostly older middle-aged women chatting and laughing as they work. They are dressed variously in neoprene overalls, fleece, sweatpants, and rubber rain gear, but each wields the same long wooden-handled rake with a curving basket reminiscent of the bucket of a backhoe. Under the predawn sky they traverse the familiar path from the village to the sandy beach and disperse out into the exposed mudflats to work.
This is the daily routine of the Confraría de Pescadores de Moaña, or Moaña Fisherman’s
Cooperative. Moaña is a fishing village of about 18,000 people on the banks of the Ría de Vigo in Galicia, Northwestern Spain. Galicia is a semi-autonomous province within Spain with its own government (Xunta de Galicia), its own language (Galego), and its own distinct cultural heritage. In contrast to the aridity of the Mediterranean coast, everything in Galicia drips with moss and ferns. There are lots of vineyards and misty green fields, stone churches and hórreos (traditional stone granaries raised on little legs). In a park not far from Moaña, I walked along a Roman road with cart wheel marks visibly ground into the stone,
up a hill to the exposed foundation of a Celtic Stone Age hill fort overlooking the Atlantic – classic Europe!
I spent my first day in Galicia exploring Santiago de Compostela, an ancient stone city with a massive 12th century cathedral at its heart where the apostle Saint James the Great is said to be buried. Pilgrims have been walking across vast tracts of Europe to pay their respects at the cathedral in Santiago for over a thousand years. These days the pilgrimage (el Camino de Santiago) attracts many secular walking enthusiasts and history buffs alongside Christians.
Drive about an hour southwest of Santiago and you enter the Rías Baxias, a coastal region of Galicia characterized by the many deep river inlets (rías) that punctuate the coast. A map of Rías Baxias looks like a load of rocky fingers reaching out into the Atlantic Ocean: a bit like midcoast Maine. These rías mix freshwater and nutrients from land with ocean water to fuel a rich abundance of marine life that has fed human societies along the shore since the Paleolothic era.
In Galicia, shell fishing on foot (marisqueo a pé) is primarily done by women, while boat fishing for shellfish and pelagics is traditionally done by men. This is a super common gendered pattern around the world, usually driven by different access to gear. Boat fishing also is more likely to involve being far from home for long periods of time, which does not mesh well with women’s traditional domestic responsibilities. This binary is certainly changing (I met with a woman who runs her own fishing boat in Moaña) but the traditional gender divides are still clearly visible.
Galicia’s shellfish collectors are called maríscadoras (“mariscos” is shellfish in Galego), and they have been organized into loose cooperative associations called “cofradías” since the middle ages. What exactly these associations did over these past centuries is not exactly clear to me, but it doesn’t seem to have been anything the Xunta de Galicia would recognize as sustainable fisheries management. Indeed, up until the 1900s shellfishing was pretty much open season, all season. Women would set out each day to collect as many shellfish as they could from the exposed banks to eat or sell at the market, or door-to-door. This excellent video shows what a typical morning looked like in 1986. Instead of being recognized as essential workers within the fishing industry, collecting and selling shellfish was often seen as just another part of a housewife’s domestic obligations.
Unsurprisingly, the breakneck speed at which shellfish were being taken from the rías eventually outpaced their natural reproduction. Stocks began to decline, and some banks were picked nearly bare. Recognizing that their livelihoods depended on restricting the pace of fishing from their town shores, the cofradías began to organize themselves across the region starting in the mid-1990s, implementing new management schemes in coordination with the regional government.
Galicia’s shellfishing grounds are now divided into TURFs: Territorial User Rights for Fishing areas. This is a style of fisheries management that gives area-based fishing rights to specific groups. In Galicia, each town has a cofradía, and each cofradía has exclusive rights to manage their own area of coastal fishing ground (in collaboration with Xunta fishing authorities). TURFs ideally encourage cooperation among community stakeholders and foster a strong sense of local ownership over the long-term sustainability of shared resources. And from what I could tell, it seems to have done just that. Many cofradías even employ their own biologist to help them monitor their stocks, establish daily catch quotas, and identify the best places to seed shellfish. They also gained official recognition as maríscadoras from the government (as opposed to being lumped in with agricultural workers or just not acknowledged at all), allowing them access to pensions and other benefits.
Each cofradía sets a daily quota for the different harvested species. Once an individual mariscadora has hit that limit, they will often go help others search or offer them any of their own excess shells. When their buckets are full, they head back to the weighing station where the catch is recorded and sorted by size and species - bigger shells fetch a better price at the market. The day’s catch is then loaded into a communal truck and driven off to market in nearby Vigo where it will be sold by auction to cleaning plants, which in turn sell to vendors, canneries, and restaurants.
Because these towns and fishing organizations have been around in some form or another for centuries, each cofradía is distinct in its politics and personality. I’m sure there is plenty of drama, but overall the impression I got was one of organization, moderation, and pride. The cofradía members take turns doing market duty and patrolling the beach every night for poachers coming in from other areas. They help each other, and they take pride in their collective identity.
Being a maríscadora is a hot commodity. To get a license you have to wait for someone to retire, so you could be on a waiting list for years. The women I spoke to liked their job because it allowed them to work outside, gave them a sense of community, and perhaps most importantly, it allows them to make a living on a humane work schedule. Fishers don’t work on Fridays (again, classic Europe!) so Monday through Thursday, the maríscadoras work for a few hours at the lowest tide. Other than that, they are free to do what they please. The pay is roughly Spain’s minimum salary, but many women living in a dual-income household said they didn’t feel like they needed a second job. In fact, the fishing license terms mandate that at least 70% of your income as an individual must come from shellfishing, eliminating the possibility of another full-time job.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how applicable this story of industry transformation is to other contexts. The maríscadoras were able to reshape the shellfishing management and governance structure of their entire region in just a decade or so, from the ground up. This is amazing!! The running of any fishery is inherently a space of constant change and debate, but I don’t see people here speaking with the same mistrust and anger I hear in the debate about the Maine lobster industry versus right whales, for instance. (Google it: can of worms alert)
To successfully rework a fishery, you so many things have to go right. You need a robust economy that can absorb the shock of any new restrictions. You need public trust, good scientific data, alternative jobs, government support, and strong community leaders. Every fishery is unique, but there are so many things to be learned from hearing different stories of innovation in different cultural and historical contexts.
After note:
I can’t believe I haven't talked about climate change here, but anyone who is curious about adaptive capacity in small scale fisheries can read the work of Dr. Elena Ojea’s amazing Future Oceans Lab Team at the University of Vigo here!
Other after note (content warning for mild medical descriptions):
Europe is very beautiful, but as Christmas draws nearer I have been finding myself getting more lonely and homesick than before. Also actually sick - I recently had the amazing experience of puking in a hostel bathroom and spending the next 24 hours wracked with fever chills, sweating in the bottom bunk of a 10-bed dormitory. On trains I stare out the window and dream of bagel sandwiches, pine trees, and in-unit laundry. Maybe this is just a bit of a venting moment to any family members and friends reading this, but I also think it's good to paint a realistic picture of what traveling for a year looks like. Maybe this is my little anti-instagram moment. I miss you all very much!!
There are no highs without lows, kid. Please know that your adoring domestic fans are anxiously awaiting your return, and boring normalcy awaits!