Spearfishing in the Canary Islands and Macaronesia

The single most useful number about this archipelago is not a temperature or a visibility figure. It is 25 metres.

WHAT THE ISLANDS OFFER. There is essentially no continental shelf. The islands rise from abyssal depths, the slope begins close inshore, and on the exposed western sides it is severe. The consequence for a diver is that structure, drop-offs and deep water are reachable from the shore in a way that requires a long boat ride almost anywhere else in Europe.

WHAT DIVERS ACTUALLY REACH. In the Instituto Español de Oceanográfico's study of Canary spearfishing catches, ninety per cent of respondents could not fish below 25 m and only ten per cent could pass 20 m. Spearfishing here carries no depth restriction other than the diver's own apnea capacity — and the capacity is the restriction.

WHY THAT MATTERS MORE THAN IT SOUNDS. It means the productive band is the top twenty metres of a wall that continues for another three thousand, and that band is where the fish a diver can actually take are living. It also means that a visitor whose experience is of a gently shelving coast will misjudge everything: the bottom does not come back up, there is no shallow shelf to drift onto, and the surface is a long way from a diver who has gone deeper than they meant to.

AND IT SETS THE EFFORT PATTERN. The same study records a mean of 2.57 fishing hours per day, 1.48 days per month and 1.82 months per year — about six days a year at sea per fisher — with a mean yield of 390 grams per fisher-hour. Almost half of all recorded journeys produced no catch at all. This is not a discipline of large regular hauls, in a place people imagine as generous.

Spearfishing is argued about, everywhere, in terms of big slow predators taken off a reef. The Canary catch record does not support that picture, and it does not support the opposite one either.

THE TOP SPECIES IS A PARROTFISH. Sparisoma cretense — the vieja — is first by both abundance and biomass: 35% of the catch by number and 20% by weight. It is fast-growing, sits at a mid trophic level around 2.9, and is not among the vulnerable species. On the strength of the catch composition alone, this is a fishery for an abundant herbivore-leaning fish.

AND THE GROUPERS TELL THE OTHER HALF. In the same dataset every single dusky grouper and every red-banded seabream taken was below the minimum scientifically advised length, as were ninety per cent of the island groupers. Those are the slow, late-maturing, sequentially hermaphroditic species the concern is actually about, they appear in the catch in ones and sevens rather than in hundreds, and the individuals being taken are immature.

BOTH OF THOSE ARE TRUE AT ONCE and a diver is better served by holding them together than by picking one. Across the whole catch, 1% was under the minimum legal length and 10% under the scientifically advised one — so the legal minimum and the biological one are not the same standard, and a fish can be lawful and still too young.

WHAT ELSE IS IN IT. Zebra seabream is second by number. Greater amberjack is second by weight on eight fish, because they are large. Then Atlantic bonito, white trevally, yellowmouth barracuda, grey triggerfish, thicklip grey mullet, Cadenat's seabream, sea bass, moray, bluefish, meagre, red mullet, island grouper, common dentex, dusky grouper and barred hogfish. Forty-one taxa in all — two pelagic, fifteen benthopelagic, thirteen demersal, fourteen reef-associated.

SCALE, BECAUSE IT IS USUALLY ASSERTED AND RARELY MEASURED. Extrapolated across Canary spearfishing licences the study estimates about 39,700 days at sea and 41.7 tonnes a year — 0.28% of what the professional sector lands. Its own conclusion is that no evidence was found to justify the current spatial restrictions on the activity. That is one study's finding about one archipelago and it is recorded as such.

The archipelago is not one place, and the differences between the islands are large enough to matter to somebody choosing where to go.

YIELD VARIES BY MORE THAN TWO TO ONE. Fuerteventura returns the highest mean yield in the study at 480 grams per fisher-hour; La Gomera the lowest at 212. Between those sit the rest.

EFFORT CONCENTRATES ON THREE ISLANDS. Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria and Tenerife carry most of the activity. Tenerife has nine distinct fishing zones and the effort is spread across them; Gran Canaria and Lanzarote are used fairly evenly across theirs; more than half of Fuerteventura's divers use one zone.

THE WESTERN ISLANDS ARE DIFFERENT AND SMALLER. El Hierro has two zones and one of them, the north-eastern, is very exposed to the dominant trade winds, so the sheltered one takes almost all the use. La Gomera effectively has one usable zone. In La Palma the least exposed water is far from the capital, and the most-used zone is the one closest to it — which is a statement about travel time rather than about fish.

WHY THAT PATTERN IS WORTH KNOWING. Exposure to the north-east trades is the organising fact of Canary sea conditions, and it repeats at every scale: the north and east coasts of each island take the swell, the south and west are the lee. The zone usage in the study is that geography showing up in human behaviour. A diver reading an unfamiliar island can predict a great deal from the wind rose and the coastline's aspect before reading a word about the site.

LA PALMA HAS ALSO CHANGED SHAPE. The 2021 Tajogaite eruption built two lava deltas on the Tazacorte coast, roughly 48 hectares of new land taken from the sea, and buried part of the island's spearfishing ground under it. The Canary fisheries directorate has been working on recovering ground elsewhere on the island in compensation, and the new coast is treated as a site of scientific interest. It is the only coast described here whose shape changed within the last five years.

Two administrations write the rules that reach a diver here, and they write different parts of them.

THE SPANISH STATE sets the frame for exterior waters in Real Decreto 347/2011. It defines the activity as fishing while breath-hold diving "sin utilizar ningún tipo de elemento que permita la respiración en inmersión" — without any device permitting underwater breathing. It permits only a hand-powered or mechanically-powered spear. It forbids carrying spearfishing gear and breathing apparatus aboard the same boat at the same time, which is a rule about the vessel rather than about the diver and is therefore checkable. It requires each diver to mark their position with a clearly visible buoy and to stay within 25 metres of it. It prohibits the activity between sunset and sunrise. And it forbids selling or commercially transferring the catch.

THE CANARY ADMINISTRATION issues the licence, and the fact worth knowing before travelling is that SPEARFISHING IS ITS OWN LICENCE CLASS. The second class habilita para la pesca recreativa submarina; the third covers surface fishing from shore or from a vessel without trolling; the first covers trolling from a vessel. They are valid for three years, they are personal and non-transferable. A visitor who buys the obvious shore licence has bought a licence for a different activity.

THREE MARINE RESERVES OF FISHING INTEREST exist in the archipelago, and their boundaries are durable geography rather than a seasonal notice. La Graciosa and the islets north of Lanzarote, jointly managed. Punta de La Restinga–Mar de Las Calmas at the south-western tip of El Hierro, created in 1996, 1,180 hectares, on a coast sheltered from the trades and named for it, zoned into an integral reserve, restricted-use zones and traditional-use zones. And Isla de La Palma, 3,455 hectares on the south-west coast down to the thousand-metre isobath, managed by the State alone because the island has no interior waters.

WHAT NONE OF THAT TELLS YOU is whether any particular piece of water is open today. Reserve zoning distinguishes fishing methods from one another, and a zone described as open to recreational fishing from the shore has not thereby said anything about spearfishing, which is a separate licence class. The reserve's managers hold that answer and nobody else does.

Spearfishing rules here vary by country, by region, by site and by species, and they change. Nothing on this page states what is currently permitted anywhere. Check the current position with the national fisheries or marine authority, the protected-area manager where one applies, and a local club or federation, who will usually know the site-level detail a national statement does not carry.

The study describes the people as well as the catch, and two of its findings are worth a visitor's attention.

THREE-QUARTERS DIVE ACCOMPANIED. That is a majority practice rather than an official recommendation, in a discipline whose fatal risk is losing consciousness underwater with nobody watching. Where a local norm and a safety authority agree, the norm is worth copying without further argument.

AND THEY ARE NOT TOURISTS. Age and experience are both bimodal — clusters at 26–30 and 41–45 years, and at 5–10 and over 20 years of experience — which the author reads as most beginning at about twenty and a substantial cohort having done it for decades. Sixty per cent dive all year; thirty per cent only in summer. What decides whether they go, in the order they gave it, is the weather, work, family, and wanting to eat fish. Ninety-five per cent said it matters to the household economy.

THAT IS THE CONTEXT A VISITING DIVER IS ENTERING. This is somebody's food and somebody's tradition before it is anybody's holiday, and the pressure a visitor adds falls on a small, sharply-bounded piece of water around an island that cannot be fished somewhere else instead.