Tavira Island, Portugal. Museum on a beach.

Rust In Peace: Portugal’s Eerie Anchor Graveyard

Tavira Island (Ilha de Tavira) hugs southern Portugal's scenic Algarve shoreline, it's long and slender dimensions hugging the coast for 6.85 miles (11km). Park of the Ria Formosa nature reserve, Tavira Island boasts some of the Algarve's best beaches.

Take a few steps back from the beach – not too many, as the island is only 500 ft to 3,300 ft (150 m to 1 km) wide – and you’ll find a curious sight among the shifting sand dunes: a graveyard of anchors.
Interestingly, the upturned tips of the half-buried anchors strikingly resemble some of the standing sea stacks characteristic of the Algarve coast.
The Cemitério das Âncoras, as it’s known in Portuguese, is an odd and unexpected assemblage of several hundred iron anchors. Gnarled and rusted from years of use and even more years of disuse, the anchors are positioned on their sides with one hook looping into the air and the other driven into the island’s moist, welcoming soil.

Anchor Species

There is no exclusionary fence at the Anchor Graveyard, no sign or signal as to who made it and for what purpose. What little we know, we have learned from the remaining descendants of the people who, for many generations, exploited the formerly abundant bluefin tuna that once plied the wild waves just offshore.
The rough and unpredictable waters where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean called for a unique tuna-fishing technique invented long ago, perhaps by the ancient Phoenicians who first explored and colonized the area before the Romans built an Empire.

The anchors might look like those used to hold small ships steady but they weren’t used for that purpose. Instead, Portugal’s traditional tuna fishermen used them to hold their huge funnel nets (“armações de atum”) in place against both the force of the sea and the exertions of massive, trapped bluefin tuna.

by weburbanist.com