When Cosimo Di Biasi, 66, decides it’s the right day to fish, he begins at 5 p.m. He drives 4 miles to the port of Torre Santa Sabina, boards Nonno Ugo, his 21-foot fiberglass boat, and navigates south for a half-hour to reach a marine reserve in Puglia, in southern Italy.
The rocky coast is interspersed with sandy beaches, and at the tip of a tiny peninsula, a majestic tower overlooks the coast. Built by the Aragonese in the 16th century to spot the invading Turkish, the tower is now the symbol of Torre Guacetoa marine reserve spanning 5,400 acres of sea and 5 miles of coastline, where only five boats and seven fishers are allowed to fish.
Di Biasi has been operating in the area since he was 10. He would skip school to fish with his father, and he would bring baskets of fish to the teacher to excuse his absences. Still, she failed him in grade six three times.
When his boat is in position, Di Biasi throws the half-mile-long leaded net into the water, which is then held up by a series of floating buoys. After this quick operation, the fisher returns home. The invisible wall will lay all night, waiting for fish to get entangled. The morning after, Di Biasi wakes up at sunrise, goes to the bar to get a coffee and a croissant, and navigates his boat back to the reserve to load up the abundant catch of the day.
Back at the port in Santa Sabina, locals, restaurant owners, and other buyers wait for Di Biasi. Many of them have already reserved fish from Di Biasi’s catch the night before. The species, like mullet, are common here; their incredible size sets Di Biasi’s catch apart.
While other fishers in the Mediterranean struggle to make ends meet, going out every night and extracting fish of any kind and size, from anchovies to dolphins, Torre Guaceto’s fishers enter the reserve only once a week, making stellar revenues of up to $10,000 a day. They are part of a cooperative management project that allows the sea to recover while they thrive economically.
But what may seem like a fairy tale today came after years of struggles and conflicts. Conservationists began the difficult task of working with local stakeholders more than 25 years ago, in a region plagued by organized crime and aggressive exploitation of natural resources. Now those fishers are the marine reserve’s greatest allies.
We are the guardians, Di Biasi says proudly. This stretch of sea is ours.
Alessandro Ciccolella, the director of Consorzio di Gestione Torre Guaceto, the management entity of the natural reserve, says that before they took over in 2001, this stretch of coast was a no-man’s-land. Organized crime had a stronghold in the area, using the shores of Torre Guaceto as a port for tobacco and drug smuggling.
Ciccolella would tell us that one day Torre Guaceto would be a reserve. But we didn’t believe him, and we didn’t care, Di Biasi says.
Fishers would detonate homemade bombs underwater, harvesting the dead fish that floated to the surface. In the process, though, they were killing marine life, destroying the reef, and risking their lives. Plus most of the kill went to the seafloor, while clouds of dust filled the waters. According to Ciccolella, fishers thought they were plowing the sea for good.
The area was so worn out that in 2001 the Consorzio, formed by World Wildlife Fund and the nearby cities of Brindisi and Carovigno, decided to close the waters of the reserve for five years to let it recover from the past exploitation.
The biggest problem for a Marine Protected Area seems to be control and management. Many projects similar to Torre Guaceto fail because of the absence of precise control of the territory. Now, after years of struggling, Torre Guaceto can count on the rigorous vigilance of the Italian Coast Guard and of the fishers. But even with such control, some illegal fishing still happens at night.
Today an unlikely event is happening: Fishers are the ones asking for the protection for the sea. We requested the director to enlarge the marine reserve, Di Biasi says. The request is now under examination by the Ministry of Environment. In the meantime, 10 other fishers from nearby towns have already started fishing with shorter nets and wider mesh sizes, hoping the reserve will be extended to include their coastlines soon.
Now Di Biasi goes to elementary schools to explain the importance of sustainable fishing. He also goes to fishing communities in other Mediterranean countries to tell incredulous fishers that it is possible to make more money while preserving the sea.
We hope they will follow our example and create a marine reserve, Di Biasi says. It took us time to learn this, but now we hope that others will do [it] too.
2020 YES! MAGAZINE