Spain’s “Octopus Capital” Has No Octopuses Left
In the Galician town of O Carballiño, the self-declared “octopus capital” of Spain, the contradiction couldn’t be starker. A bronze statue of an octopus towers over the square, the streets are lined with pulperías, and a festival celebrates octopus every year. But the town’s century-old octopus factory hasn’t sourced a single animal from local waters in over a decade.
Every octopus that passes through the plant today comes from Mauritania or Morocco. They’re vacuum-sealed, shipped across Europe, Asia, and the United States, and marketed as a delicacy to tourists and gourmets. Galicia’s own waters have been emptied, the local population pushed into collapse.
This is not a story of “bad luck with fishing.” It is the inevitable result of centuries of entitlement, treating living beings as commodities and ecosystems as warehouses for human appetite. Spain’s love affair with octopus, and the global demand that feeds it, has left one of the world’s most intelligent animals fighting for survival.
Collapsing populations, collapsing excuses
Octopus numbers fluctuate naturally, but the long-term trend in Spain is downward. Fishers admit it. “The population has only just come back, but once the season opens, we’ll destroy it all in two weeks,” said Juan Martínez, who has fished for over four decades. He remembers a time when pulling octopuses from the sea felt endless. Now his traps sit idle along the dock in Cangas, a monument to the arrogance of calling this a “sustainable industry.”
The ecosystem itself has been broken. Octopus depend on nutrient-rich upwelling, deep ocean waters that bring food to the surface. Climate breakdown is scrambling those cycles. Warmer seas, shifting winds, and stratification mean fewer nutrients and fewer octopuses. Even when fishers lay off, nature can’t repair itself at the pace industrial appetites demand.
But the industry isn’t slowing down. It is changing tactics. When wild populations can no longer keep up, corporations turn to the factory model: farming octopuses in tanks, raising them by the million to slaughter.
The push for farming
Spain’s seafood giants, Nueva Pescanova and Grupo Profand, are racing to make industrial octopus farms a reality. Nueva Pescanova’s Canary Islands project would confine and kill up to a million octopuses each year. The company has refused to explain how, but leaked documents point to ice-slurry baths — essentially slow suffocation in freezing water.
Animal advocates have been clear: farming octopuses is not just cruel, it’s absurd. These are solitary, intelligent, emotionally complex animals. They solve puzzles, use tools, and dream. They also cannibalise each other under stress. Locking them in tanks by the thousand is not “innovation,” it’s torture repackaged as progress.
The problems go further. Octopuses are carnivores, eating up to three times their body weight. Farming them would devour wild fish just to feed the captives. Waste would foul coastal waters. And because there is no way to stun an octopus at scale, death would come by clubbing, slicing, suffocation, or chilling.
Even some within the aquaculture world admit the contradiction. Michael Sealey of Oceana Europe says aquaculture should focus on species with low environmental costs like oysters and mussels, not feeding wild fish to carnivores in cages. But corporate profit always finds a way to present killing as “sustainability.”
The UK’s “bonus” bloodbath
If Spain is the story of scarcity, the UK is briefly the story of excess. This year, warmer waters around Devon and Cornwall triggered an octopus boom. At Brixham market, 36 tonnes of octopus corpse passed through in a single day — compared to just 200kg the year before.
Local merchants describe it as a “financial bonus,” a windfall worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. The octopuses, drawn north from Morocco and Mauritania by a marine heatwave, were swept up in crab pots, trawlers, and cuttlefish traps. With no quota in place, the industry is cashed in.
Octopuses invading crab and lobster pots are also being vilified as competitors, blamed for eating “valuable” shellfish. The very intelligence and adaptability that should inspire respect becomes another excuse to kill.
Marine biologists are clear: this boom is not stability, it is climate chaos. Spikes in sea temperatures, driven by human-induced heating, create unpredictable surges. Octopuses may flood in one year and vanish the next. To treat this as a “bonus” is to miss the warning siren entirely.
Sentience isn’t optional
The scientific evidence is no longer deniable. A 2021 review of over 300 studies by the London School of Economics found “very strong evidence of sentience” in octopuses. They feel pain, pleasure, hunger, comfort, even joy. They play. They recognise individual humans. They change colour not just to hide but to express emotion.
The UK’s Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act recognised this, extending protection to octopuses. Yet recognition on paper does little when industry continues to boil, club, and suffocate them by the millions.
The problem is not that we don’t know. It’s that we don’t care enough to stop.
A symptom of the larger disease
Spain’s “octopus capital” running out of octopuses is not a mystery. It’s the same pattern seen with tuna, cod, herring, whales, and countless others. Overfishing, climate collapse, and endless demand create scarcity. Scarcity justifies more extreme methods — bigger nets, deeper waters, factory farms.
At the root is the same supremacist mindset: the belief that other animals exist for us, that their lives, intelligence, and relationships are irrelevant compared to our tastebuds and profits.
Octopus are not “resources.” They are not “stocks.” They are not “bonuses.” They are individuals with lives that matter to them. To reduce them to commodities is to participate in the same logic that has driven species after species to the brink.
The cultural hypocrisy
“My Octopus Teacher” brought millions of viewers to tears with the story of one octopus in South African kelp forests. People marvelled at her intelligence, her resilience, her relationship with a human. She was treated as someone, not something.
Yet the very same societies that cried over her story line up to eat her relatives. In Spain, diners snap photos of tentacles sizzling in olive oil. In England, a temporary glut becomes a payday. In Japan and South Korea, octopus remains a staple, often eaten alive.
We know who they are. We just choose to forget when the plate arrives.
The future being written now
Octopus farming is being sold as a solution to dwindling numbers. In reality, it is the same industrial logic that caused the collapse in the first place. Taking animals who are wild, solitary, and sentient and locking them in tanks is not “sustainable.” It is escalation.
The U.S. has shown one path: ban it before it begins. Spain is showing the other: double down on exploitation until the seas are empty and the tanks are full. The question is which vision the world will follow.
If octopuses are farmed at scale, there is no going back. The suffering will be industrialised, the deaths multiplied, the myth of “sustainable seafood” reinforced.
The abolitionist answer
The only ethical path is abolition. Not reform, not “higher welfare,” not farming with bigger tanks or different slaughter methods. The principle must be clear: octopuses are not ours to use. Their lives belong to them, not to Spanish festivals, Galician factories, or English markets.
When we stop reducing them to commodities, we will stop needing to invent new ways to exploit them. And maybe — just maybe — the seas will have a chance to heal.
Spain’s octopus capital is a warning: when you build your identity on the backs of others, collapse is inevitable. O Carballiño’s statue may stand tall, but its message is hollow. A culture that prides itself on killing has nothing to celebrate when the animals are gone.
Octopuses are among the most extraordinary beings on Earth. They think, feel, play, and dream. Yet we drag them from their homes, slice them open, suffocate them in ice, and call it tradition, business, or delicacy.
Spain’s octopus capital importing its octopuses is not just ironic. It is tragic. It shows what happens when consumption outruns respect, when demand outruns decency.
We can continue down this path — farming them, marketing them, and pretending it’s normal — or we can stop, recognise their lives, and choose emancipation over exploitation.
Because eating octopuses is not culture. It is not necessity. It is not sustainability.
It is wrong.