Who scared, lost.

Ugly but delicious: Galician barnacles are considered the most expensive gourmet specialty of the Atlantic. But the fishermen, from the rugged sea cliffs scratch, for risking their lives prey - each time their job is a race against time.

 

There is hardly a day when Suso Lista not his friend Jaime thinks. Eight years ago is now, but it comes before it, as if it happened yesterday. A huge wave was as appeared from nowhere and had the 27-year-olds from the black-gray rocks torn. A moment later he was gone, the sea had him fetched easily swallowed. He never appeared again. Jaime was the last in a long line fishermen injured in Corme, a village of 800 people in Galicia, the wetterwendischen province in northwestern Spain. Until now - because everyone here knows that this is not the last tragedy was to be that others will follow.

The people in Corme are very devout, like most in Galicia, like most in Spain. And the stories that are told, are always with the sea to do so. Stories from the Atlantic, the life and life can take, how the mighty God. "We believe in God and the sea," said Suso Lista, 47 years old, a stocky man with a full beard and sailor hat. And already the name of the coast can imagine that the reverence for great people to the whims of the ocean have: "Costa da morte", the death coast.

For 22 years, list as "Percebeiro" as the duck mussel fisherman named. Not that he made the misfortune of his friend had not learned, but for many this is one of the few opportunities in this remote, of unemployment and emigration region ever to earn money. In Spain belong Percebes that falsely Mussels hot, but the crabs are, to the most sought-after gourmet food. They are regarded as the most expensive specialty of the Atlantic. The thicker, the more money they bring, sometimes over 100 euros for a kilo, usually around 20 euros.

Foreign wrinkled, inside flavor

But the biggest specimens grow on the bottom of the deep sharp-edged rock in the tidal zone. There, they sprout clumps instance, feed on plankton that they filter from the water. They look like wrinkled fingers. Even the fishermen say they were ugly things. But they taste wonderful. The tender, lean meat salted hides under the pachyderm elephant skin of the foot, it sits the head of shimmering horn plates.

SPAIN AND PORTUGAL-QUIZ

AP, DDP, Antje Blinda