The Algarve, Portugal’s southern coastal region, is dotted with many inviting beaches.  Flat, with broad sands fronting calm seas, they are perfect for the many northern European tourists who visit.  One of these spots is Praia do Barril.  It’s located in the eastern Algarve between Tavira and Olhão.  As the Portuguese word for barrel is barril, I wondered what this beach might have had to do with wooden barrels.  
    The first revelation, and one that few of the tourists would realize, was that Praia do Barril has a long history with the fishing for tuna.  The second was that the barrels were involved with the tuna fishing, but not in the way I imagined.  
   To get to the beach at Praia do Barril from the parking lot, one has the option of riding on a small, narrow-gauge railway or walking the kilometre alongside the track.   The railway and walk end at a series of old, stone buildings, nestled among low sand dunes, with the beach just beyond.  Originally, some of these structures were the seasonal homes for the tuna fishermen and their families, while the others were used as a chapel, a school and sheds to store their nets, cables, floats and other gear during the winter.  Converted in the 1980s, they are now cafes and restaurants and basic tourist accommodations.  The only barrels I have seen there are used in the bars as stand-up tables, or as containers to hold plastic trash bags.
   This annual fishing community was established to catch the tuna during their late-spring migration eastward to spawn in the Mediterranean.  But the fishing for them goes back a long way, certainly to the Roman era and possibly to their predecessors, the Phoenicians.   By the Middle Ages, it started to become a significant business for the native Portuguese.  And in the 17-to-1800s it had ramped up into a major industry, including erecting the fisherman’s housing at Praia do Barril, and a large plant, capable of processing thousands of tunas, constructed in Tavira.   
    During those at least twenty centuries of seeking the tuna, the fishermen developed ever more elaborate and complex structures to capture the fish.  By the mid-1800s they had designed and would annually construct an extensive system of vertical, surface to sea floor, nets.  Built in the form of a ‘V’, the arms of the net system stretched one kilometre in each direction across the tuna’s swimming path.  As the tuna are huge, often two metres in length, and heavy, requiring three men to haul them into the boats, the nets had to be substantial.  To secure them in position, hundreds of enormous iron sea anchors were utilized.   
    The fish were forced into a dead-end at the bottom of the ‘V’.  There, the net was also laid on the seafloor.  Atop this cul-de-sac sat large boats, manned by hundreds of fishermen.  Once the net was full of fish, it took the combined strength of the many men to pull, hand-over-hand, the net to the surface where the thrashing fish could be individually hauled out and dumped into the boats.  Once the boats were full, they would head to the processing plant in Tavira, not to Paria do Barril as I originally thought.  It was the wary fishermen that beached their small boats at Paria do Barril, safe at home with their wives and kids.  
   At this point, the wooden barrels come into the story.  The processing plants also employed hundreds of people to clean, section into steaks and other cuts, and salt the fish.  (The salt was obtained from the vast acres of nearby salt flats.)  These valuable pieces of tuna meat were then placed into wooden barrels for shipment to customers worldwide.   With southern Portugal having no oak species suitable for barrels, I suspect the barrels for the tuna were constructed of pine and of about 200 litres in size (about the same as a whiskey barrel).  The barrels were utilized for the salted tuna packaging up until the mid-1900s when canning, as the preferred form of packaging, replaced them.  
   So, what’s with the name Praia do Barril?  This beach is just one along the Ria Formosa, a narrow, 40-kilometre stretch of barrier dunes.  The beach takes its name from its location at a bulge in the Ria Formosa rather than the use of significant numbers of barrels in the fisherman’s quarters.  
   The name of the beach, and the use of the wooden barrels and casks used to package the processed tuna, are pragmatic, neither romantic or earthshaking.  However, the story behind the efforts of the hundreds of fishermen committed their lives into developing and setting the nets and catching and processing the tuna is astounding.  
Sadly, however, they became too efficient at their job.  In the mid-1800s, the yearly catch was 20,000 to 30,000 fish per season, and this was just one fishing site along the Algarve; there were others and also several along Spain’s southern border.  By the 1960s the annual numbers of fish caught at this site dropped to just a few thousand per year, and by the 1970s, almost none; totally overfished.   The fisherman had to find other work, their seasonal quarters, like Praia do Barril, were remodelled into tourist facilities, and the processing plants now sit decaying in the towns.