A new town (La Guardia, Spain)

It’s Thursday evening, and I’ve spent a little bit more than a full day at La Guardia, which is one river away from Portugal. (I plan to cross by ferry to the Portuguese town of Caminha tomorrow or the day after!) La Guardia is smaller than La Corunha and much more vertical – the first few times I asked people how to get to the port, they said, “Oh, just go down!” Going down (it is a steep down) always gets you to the port; going up (it is an even steeper up) always gets you to the main road. Around the town are hills covered in trees, a wide river, and the ocean, which is always a different shade of blue and breathtaking. (I am pretty sure that I was a sea creature in another life. Perhaps a giant squid.)

My timing so far has been impeccable. Yesterday I walked to the port and asked when the fish auction was. “Oh! It’s right now!” the woman said. So I walked to the lonja, a small building that sits next to the concrete slide leading into the water. The entrance was guarded by the same signs I encountered in La Corunha --“ONLY AUTHORIZED PEOPLE WITH PORT BUSINESS” – and six mostly toothless and white-haired (or no-haired) men and women who blinked at me. Thinking that it would be rude to try to sneak past them after obviously having read and understood the sign, I asked where I should go to get permission, and suddenly they were all talking at once: “Oh, permission, no no no, just go on in, you’re welcome, you don’t need authorization, right through here, walk on in, go ahead!” People here are so friendly! I will digress for a moment to explain just how friendly they are: In La Corunha, every time I asked for directions, the person would either give me detailed directions and make sure that I understood them or, if they didn’t know, ask somebody else who was passing by. One man walked all around a plaza with me looking for a specific bus and said, “Listen, if we don’t find this stop, I will take you myself by car!” (I’ve promised several people that I won’t be trusting this year, so I said, “Oh, mmm, hmm” and didn’t have to worry any further, because we found the stop.) Last night in La Guardia I asked a pair of women if they could tell me where to find a pizzeria, and they walked with me five blocks and said, “There you go! It’s a block away. Walk up that hill and you can’t miss it!” This is not to mention how willing the fishermen are to speak with me, a visitor who watches them while they work and asks ignorant (getting less ignorant as the days go by!) questions.

Now that we’re on the topic of fishermen I can go back to writing about the lonja in La Guardia, which is tiny. The auction is much calmer and quieter than in La Corunha, because it’s done electronically: a big screen shows the falling prices, and, if somebody wants to stop at a certain price, they push a button on their little individual controls. The fare is quite different, too. Here, most of the boxes are full of percebes, which, Google informs me, are called “goose barnacles” in English. In the north, they are extremely dangerous to harvest – they form on rocks lapped by strong waves, and people tie themselves to ropes and try to time their quick descents well (some inevitably die each year). Here in the south, they grow in calmer waters, and it is women who harvest them! I had been wondering why there were so many women in the lonja. Apparently the percebes that grow along the shore are collected by percebeiras, and those that grow on rocks in the open sea are collected by men, percebeiros. Also interesting is the time of harvest! Because the percebes are only exposed during low tide, they are collected mostly during the full and new moon – about ten to twelve days a month. These days, most of the men with boats are collecting them, so there were few fish up for sale at the lonja. I imagine that this will be different in a week. Also, octopus season starts in the first week of July, and everyone has told me that they are looking forward to it, since they can count on making a lot of money. If they catch octopi, that is. That is a big “if” that keeps coming up in conversation. Whenever I ask about seasonal fish, the fishermen say something like, “Well, yes, the sardines come around this time, if they come.” This year, they told me, they haven’t come.

That “if” is the reason many people have decided not to fish, a man named Luis told me. In the past few decades, the number of fishermen in La Guardia has gone from thousands to around 300; most young people choose to work on land, in factories or other businesses, instead of going out to sea like their parents (fathers) had. He had an interesting life story! He used to work on a huge ship that captured mostly squid in the far north. He and his crewmates would be on the ship for four to five months at a time (!), and, after crossing the Atlantic, they would be dropped off somewhere in South America and given money for a plane ride home, where they’d spend a month or so before setting off again. It was a hard life, but he was able to retire at 55 with a monthly stipend that he finds generous. Now he comes to the docks to talk with his friends – I think that they played together as children!

I met two other people I hope to encounter again: Benito, who is by far the most talkative of the men I’ve met so far, and spews useful information without much prompting (the exact schedules of the fishermen, for example), and David, a much younger man (also extremely good-looking, so in my head I call him “Dashing David”) who told me about fishing while he eviscerated congrios. I tried to put on a poker face, but I may have twitched a little when I noticed that one of the fish was still moving as he cut into it. Aaaagh. I’ve been vegetarian again all afternoon.

If I stay in La Guardia for a few more days (I have to see how things go!), my schedule will look like this: at 11ish I’ll be at the port to see a few fishermen untangling and cleaning their nets and talk with them. At 4:30ish I’ll be back at the port to chat with people at the lonja and talk with fishermen who are putting their nets back into their boats. I really want to get in a boat at some point (at 4:00 am!), but the ones here are built for one person and I doubt that I could “disappear” on command – I’d be too much in the way.

In the early mornings, afternoons and late evenings, I will explore! Today I climbed up to the Monte de Santa Trega, where I saw a 2000-year-old castro (collection of round stone houses) and Portugal (across the river!). I went into an archaeology museum at the top and when I came out, I was inside a cloud! Fantastic. In yet another life I was a bacterium in a water droplet.