Swimming with red tuna, a new eco-tourism attraction in Catalonia’s Costa Daurada
The Balfegó Group has started to offer a ‘Tuna-Tour’ that allows tourists to visit in catamaran the farms where tuna are fed and being taken care of. The Balfegó Group aims to show off its sustainable fishing techniques for preserving this endangered species. The tour lasts two hours and fifteen minutes and allows tourists to swim with the endangered fish if they want to.
L’Ametlla de Mar (ACN).- The company Grup Balfegó, leader in commercialization and exportation of Mediterranean red tuna, now offers a different form of ecological tourism. Balfegó chose l’Ametlla de Mar, a town on Catalonia’s Costa Daurada, as a place to offer visitors the new ‘Tuna Tour’, It consists in a maritime excursion on board of a catamaran to see their aquaculture pools, where they raise red tuna. The tour lasts two hours and fifteen minutes and allows tourists to swim with the endangered fish if they want to.
Grup Balfegó, invested a million euros in building the catamaran, and wants to take advantage of the Tuna Tour to promote itself in the tourism sector and also to show off their sustainable fishing and breeding techniques. They expect up to 7,000 visitors each month.
A spokesman for the Grup Balfegó explained that they let the red tuna breed in open water to conserve the species, and then transport them alive to the aquaculture pools where they feed them according to their natural diet. They are billing more than 30 million euros a year in exports to the major markets of red tuna in the world. Its main buyer is Japan, which takes half the value of all the group’s production.