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tunas at sea close to the shore or operated from the shore . This was also evident from some painted documents
held in the Archives of the Duque de Medina Sidonia (García García, 2012; López González & Ruiz, 2012),
showing a beach seine in the XVI century (Figure 8). There is evidence that since classic times this beach seine
fishery was an industrial one, with specific economic organisations, land-based factories and conflicts about the
fishing rights.

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Immediatelly after these first images, there is the image of a typical “mattanza” in a set trap (Sarà, 1983, 1998)
which was painted by an anonymous Sicilian artist in Trapani (Sicily) in the XVII century (Figure 9). This is a
very interesting image, because it shows a lot of details about the final harvesting operation, which is carried out
on a traditional set tuna trap. Furthermore, it provides not only two very well defined images of bluefin tunas but
also three different predatory behaviours of bluefin tunas attacking shoals of small pelagic fish. The use of
traditional set tuna traps in Sicily is confirmed by many documents (Di Natale, 2012), and also by several
images. It is interesting to note that all documents from Sicily usually refer only to set traps. A descriptive figure,
also in terms of clothes used by the tuna trap workers, is given in Figure 10, which shows another typical
“mattanza”, painted by an anonymous Sicilian artist in Trapani (Sicily) in the first part of the XVIII century on
ceramic floor tiles (Sarà, 1983). The widespread use of the set traps for bluefin tuna in Italy is documented by
various images from the XVIII century: one of the most known is an engraving by the priest Antonio Bova,
showing a traditional set trap used in Trapani (Figure 11), but also a painting, again from Trapani, showing
another type of set tuna trap (Figure 12), because each trap was organised in a different way, taking into account
the local characteristics of the area and the incoming courses of bluefin tunas, even keeping the same concept of
the net structure. One of the artists providing a lot of details about the tuna trap fishery in Sicily was Jean-Pierre
Louis Laurent Houël, who included in the famous four volumes about his travels to Sicily, Malte and Lipari
(carried out between 1769 to 1772 and published in 1782), four masterpiece etchings, derived from watercolours,
on tuna traps in Trapani (Figure 13). These etchings show details about the way of making the ropes and cords
for the trap, technical views of the trap and some gears for slaughtering the tunas, the closure of the “death
chamber” and the “mattanza”. The etchings provided by the Sardinian Jesuit and naturalist Francesco Cetti
(1777) (Figure 14) confirmed that tuna set traps where the most common type of trap used for bluefin tuna in
Italy since that time or even the only one.

The use of what is nowadays considered a traditional set trap for bluefin tuna was certainly diffused in several
countries in the XVIII century. An ancient French map, made in 1714 (Figure 15), not only shows the several
small tuna set traps, all of the same size, in the area close to Marseille, but it also reveals how they were set one
after the other, logically fishing along the same migratory course (this possibly affected some yields). Joseph
Vernet, in 1754, painted the world-famous oil on canvas (Figure 16), showing the harvesting of bluefin tuna in
the set trap in the Gulf of Bandol (southern France, between Marseille and Toulon). Using this image, the
famous engravers Charles-Nicolas Cochin and Jacques Philippe Le Bas made the largest etching available in the
XVIII century on the tuna trap fishery (Figure 17), published in 1760, as one of the engravings in the series “Les
Ports de France” (1760-1767). This famous image was published with small variations several times by other
authors and engravers in the following decades. Others and more technical images of tuna traps in France were
made available by the fundamental work on fishery and fish by Duhamel de Monceau (1769-1782), who, in the
second volume (1772) included a description of the tuna trap fishery in France and two engravings of tuna set
traps. The same description was provided by Charles Joseph Panckoucke (1792-1793), who had the permit to
reprint and improve the famous monumental “Encyclopédie”, originally edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le
Rond D’Alembert between 1751 and 1782. Panckoucke (1793), in the separate volume of tables, also provided
the same engravings made by Duhamel de Monceau, but mirror printed (Figure 18).

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Further images of set traps, at least two types (“de buche” or “de anclas” ) are held in the archives of Archives
of the Duque de Medina Sidonia (López González & Ruiz, 2011), confirming the use of these traps also in
Spain. The very important work by Sañez Reguart (1791), a fundamental illustrated dictionary of fishing gears,
which was possibly inspired by the volumes by Duhamel de Monceau (1769-1782), also includes several
detailed descriptions and figures about the Spanish bluefin tuna fishing activity. Sañez Reguart provided, for the

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The Spanish names for the tuna seines were “almadraba de vista” and “almadraba de tiro”.
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“Matanza” is the correct Spanish word for defining the final harvesting or slaughtering of bluefin tuna in a trap, even if in the earliest times,
the most used name was “la sacada”. The Italian and Sicilian word for the same operation, clerly derived from the Spanish one, is
“mattanza”.
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This type of tuna trap was a mixset system, with a part of set nets arranged in chambers and one or more mobile nets, manouvered by small
vessels close to the entrance, having the role of pushing the tuna school into the inner part of the trap. These nets are not used nowadays.
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This type of tuna trap, also called in Spanish “almadraba de monteleva”, is comprised only of nets fixed to the seafloor, forming a complex
of chambers; it is now commonly considered the “traditional tuna trap”.

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