Fishing in Spain and the joys of putting something back

If you’d told me three-and-a-half/four years ago when I left England to come to Spain that I was going to be the editor of a magazine; a Spanish-language carp fishing magazine at that, I would have said you were crazy. But I have been interested in fishing for a long time…

My first fish, I imagine would have been a perch or a roach, caught in the UK at around the tender age of twelve. I fished until I was about 18 but kind of knocked it on the head until I moved here. I started  to notice the lakes around Madrid, I did a bit of fishing and had a bit of success. A lot of people are surprised really. They say of Madrid – ‘what does it have?’ But when you start looking at maps and looking at satellite pictures and start seeing what’s here, there’s actually quite a lot of water around. Because construction is just crazy they’re constantly quarrying and making gravel pits, (graveras) – they need the stone. The water table is so high that these mines start to fill up as soon as they stop quarrying, so within five years or so nature takes its toll and boom! Life. Frogs, newts, insects, larvae, worms – you’ve got a little ecosystem going on.

Granted, it’s called ‘fishing’, not ‘catching’ but it is still such a joy to catch a fish. It’s fun. If young people can get into the sport, they start to realize that maybe they shouldn’t vandalize or leave litter  in canals and lakes and reservoirs. They actually start to enjoy different things – wildlife, birds etc. Like I do.

Granted, it’s called ‘fishing’, not ‘catching’ but it is still such a joy to catch a fish. It’s fun. If young people can get into the sport, they start to realize that maybe they shouldn’t vandalize or leave litter  in canals and lakes and reservoirs. They actually start to enjoy different things – wildlife, birds etc. Like I do.

Killing fish simply for sport is totally unnecessary. Caza is awful. I don’t hate anything but I hate cazadores. I hate hunting. I hate the killing of any animals for sport; the cruelty. It’s the whole money-driven thing; the status thing. What we do in the magazine is as far left of caza as it’s possible to be. I’m going to try and do everything that I can to change people’s minds about this.

If you say there’s a 25 kilogram carp in a particular lake, it can be caught, photographed, weighed and returned to the water. Nowadays with digital cameras, videos; you can show it to your family. It’s still prestigious, it’s still a trophy. If that fish is photographed and returned and the photos sent to us at the magazine – the number of people that will come from outside of Europe to try and catch that fish and the money that will be spent is amazing. Why take it back to the kitchen, show it your grandad and then throw it in the bin? If you catch it and eat it, I feel slightly more comfortable about that, but carp is a spiny, bottom feeding fish, so it doesn’t taste any good.

Imagine the situation when a young boy or anybody catches a 20 kg carp. That’s a big fish. I guarantee that the person who caught that fish will never forget that day and the joy they experienced catching it. They don’t need to kill it. Imagine if they return the fish. Next year, somebody else can catch it.

I swim the waters, I go down on the floor and find out what’s in there. Watercraft is like a sixth sense. It’s pure instinct – you’re looking at the wind, looking at the make-up of the water, looking at the depth; reading it and gauging how to match your bait to the fish’s natural food sources. It’s strategic, it’s military. You need determination, dedication, presentation – you can end up thinking like a fish! Certainly swimming the lakes is more acceptable here and is definitely safer than in the UK. The last time I fished over there, I scratched my eye after handling fish and caught an eye infection. UK waters are rife with disease.

In England it has to be policed whereas here they don’t know as much about those aspects – farmers do release pesticides into the waters quite freely. There’s certainly not the preservation we’ve got in the UK and it's not very well respected as an activity here. It is a recognized sport now at least and next year they’re going to start legalizing night fishing.

Yet Spain’s a paradise because it’s unknown. I feel like Christopher Columbus rediscovering America. It’s already been discovered of course, but there are so many lakes here and we have absolutely no idea what exists. For sure, on the reservoir Santilliana near Manzanares el Real, Madrid there’s a world record carp less than 45 minutes from the centre of the capital. When that fish is caught it will bring so much money, so much custom, so much tourism from France, from Italy; from all over the world.

The current world record fish reside in France and Germany – two different fish that are about the same weight. The lake in France is called Rainbow Lake. To fish there for one week costs in excess of 500 euros. There are only 30 or 40 positions around the bank and it’s full every single day, all year round. Just for the chance of catching this one fish!

Until 1987, the UK record was about 20 kilos, but I’ve got photos from El País in 1952 of a carp that was caught in Madrid in the 1950s that weighed 35 kilos. It wasn’t counted on the world ranking because the carp is not accepted as a native fish here even though it’s been here for god knows how many years. As yet there’s no board, there’s no ombudsman, there’s no federation. There’s no association that’s actually bothered to even note it as a record, even though unofficially we know it was. That fish attracted some of the top anglers from England to Santilliana in the Communidad de Madrid. In a way, I’m passing in their footsteps.

Fishing is an industry that’s passion-driven and objective driven. If I know that there’s fish of a particular weight in there, I want to catch it and I won’t stop until I do. In England, there are 1 million carp fishermen alone and some of them have been fishing for 15 years and have never caught anything larger than 18lbs. Here, the record is 70lbs plus – massive!

Obviously, I did the research and saw that there was a hole in the market for a Spanish language carp fishing magazine here. The market’s sustainable, so I thought, let’s try and make it work. We’re raising awareness. We can get political. We can have a voice and really start kicking up some scourge. There are at least 5,000 carp fisherman in Spain now and they are aware that things are not quite as they should be. They’re reading in the magazine about what’s happening in Germany, what’s happening in France. The magazine is intended as a platform for people to voice their opinions on these matters.

I’ve denounced the Ministerio de Medio Ambiente and the Canal Isabel Segundo II twice for not managing the water systems; for dead cows in the water etc. I expect that in Africa, but Spain is not a third world country. There’s loads of money from the EU and basically its being pocketed and areas are being completely neglected. I think the government has turned a bit of a blind eye to carp fishing due to its associations with the dictatorship: There is a rumor that Hitler gave Franco the carp for his embalses (reservoirs). I know for a fact that the fish in the Retiro were given to Franco by Hitler: The Retiro fish are Nazi carp.

As for the other carp introduced to Spain, I can’t get the evidence. But basically, Franco commissioned many reservoirs: he was obsessed by water. The carp is from the Seine. Hitler had carp – it’s a fast growing fish, it’s a food source. When you’re in times of war and the country’s in poverty, what better to have in your lakes than a source of food? They breed like hell; they grow massive. Who knows?...

Andy Macgregor is the editor of the bi-monthly magazine Carp Diem, available in fishing shops and kiosks around Spain.