‘Look around you!’ exclaims Cristian Cao. ‘I love my job. It’s beautiful here.’ Obediently, we follow his gaze, taking in craggy, yet richly verdant shoreline, the dazzling whitewashed houses of Palamós and the Blue Planet-turquoise of the Mediterranean. Cristian is a mariscador: a fisherman for crustaceans, as opposed to a pescador, which catches fish, and we’re standing on the coast of the Costa Brava: home to Salvador Dalí, world-class beaches, a galaxy of Michelin stars and – for the people of Catalonia – a veritable Mecca for what they and many other countries consider a delicacy of the sea.
Sea urchins. Yes, those spiky, bruised purple creatures, which sit in clusters along the seabed and look – well, anything but edible. In Spain they’re known as erizos de mar: hedgehogs of the sea. They’re the Spanish answer to the oyster: too expensive, rarefied or weird by the standards of many Spaniards, ‘but they’re a traditional food here in Palamós,’ says Cristian. ‘It’s not that you don’t have them growing in the rest of Spain. They are there, but people don’t have a taste for them and don’t collect them up. It’s like goose barnacles: people in Europe pay big money for them because there are only a limited amount and they’re hard to access – but in South America [where Cristian is originally from] they have beaches full of them.’
In Palafrugell, Cristian’s picturesque village nearby, you’ll find urchins on every menu. Indeed, so venerated is this intense, briny, bright essence of seawater, it has its own festival: la garoinada, during which Catalans from across the region descend on Palafrugell and its neighboring fishing villages. Where the Italians typically toss them in pasta and the French stir them through soufflés, sauces and omelettes, the Catalans enjoy them as is: served raw either in their shell, or alongside a plate of local blood sausage and green garlic shoots. The festival runs from 13 January to 30 March; the sea urchin season, however, lasts throughout the winter, when sea urchins are at their tastiest. So it was on a bright November morning that we found ourselves accompanying Cristian on his daily expedition under the sea.
