As armações de atum no Algarve: A visão literária de Raul Brandão, Sousa Costa e Manuel Teixeira Gomes

From ancient times until at least the 1970s, tuna fishing was one of the Algarve region’s greatest assets. The fishing traps set up every year on the high seas off the Algarve coast had a significant political, economic, environmental and social impact on the region. They encouraged the seasonal relocation of large masses of people to the coastline, where they built small villages – arraiais – to support the fishing. The influence and beauty of this fishing have been recorded not only in historical documentation, but also in artistic and cultural productions such as painting and literature. The travel accounts of three authors will be considered, by analyzing the content of their works, which frame their experience of observing the capture of schools of tuna in fixed traps in the 1920s. These veritable labyrinths of nets, buoys and anchors that trapped these animals during their biological migration between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, and then on their return to the ocean, were the setting for their observations and narratives. The texts by Raul Brandão, Sousa Costa and Manuel Teixeira Gomes will be presented from the perspective of the Blue Humanities, which considers the rela tionship between human societies and the rest of the natural world in literary works. This approach allows us to revisit an Algarve of yesteryear, partly absorbed by construction on the coast and the consequences of tourism and real estate pressure to which the region has been subjected in recent decades, in which the relationship between people and the coastal environment is the center of the story lived and told.