The giant bones wedged into the sand give this corner of Península Valdés the atmosphere of an alien planet: rib-cages over two metres long, buried like lampposts, tilted into an arch. The whalebones seem light and in their off-white colouring they glint against the choppy sea of a grey August morning. This is the village of Playa Larralde, an accumulation of shanty huts reached after travelling over bumpy gravel and mud roads beyond Puerto Pirámides. Small constructions on the side of the bones defying the wind, which in this region does not beat about the bush.

The cold does not matter here. It is Magellan season, people go out and take advantage, as they did yesterday and the day before yesterday, weather permitting. With the high tide, the fishers start a ritual repeated daily: on motorboats, pulled by a tug which will get them into the sea, they will seek the spot some of them know on the high seas and there they will dive in search of shellfish. Thus, they begin an art handed down from generation to generation, offering a sustainable and popular economy developed in one of the world’s most unique locations.

In a province where industrial fishing is one of this country’s biggest earners of foreign currency, these small economies will not budge. They tell other stories.

Hands in the water

They are far out of range of the radars controlled by international trawlers at the 200th mile (within this boundary, maritime law grants the country sovereignty over soil and subsoil resources on the continental shelf; beyond it, they are international waters, open to all). They are also far from the provincial vessels on national waters which contribute 30 percent of exports. Chubut is the country’s second most important fishing province. A dollar-minting machine in the form of prawns and shrimp. Far from all that, the artisanal trawlers are small dots on gulfs surviving daily and lingering in a trade which does not give them any dollars, but for those brave enough to go there it offers, besides a few blows, the adrenaline only known by those who spend their lives at sea.

Shellfish belong to the animal world with a huge variety. The entire invertebrate world would fall into this category, as well as Magellan mussels and scallops. They both belong to these organisms with two valves, like castanets. In this part of the San José Gulf, as in the entire region of the Patagonian seas, there is an abundance of molluscs, crustaceans and fish. There are mussels, spider crabs, sardines and hake. In August, Magellan mussels enter the underwater window display.