Cidália Nunes

At seventy years old, there are barely a handful of days in Cidália Nunes’s life when she hasn’t stepped into the sea. She refuses, cannot even imagine,living any other way, even as her body begins to bear the marks of a lifetime spent in salt and tides. “It started the day I was born. We are born from the sea, and we are raised by the sea,” she says, an inheritance spoken with the same natural certainty that led her to follow her parents’ craft.

Crab became her life’s work. Not simply a trade, but a living compass of the ecosystem itself. For fifty years, it has been the thread connecting her to the tides, and through it fishermen bring in octopus, sea bass, gilthead bream, snapper, and sargo.

Her days rise and fall with the tides’ command. She may go out twice, chasing the fleeting moments when the water allows her in. “Sometimes we can’t lift everything. The tide drops too fast. We can only work at high tide,” she explains. There is no attempt to soften the truth: this is grueling work, physical, ancestral, sharpened only by time, instinct, and resilience.

When she returns to her earliest memories, she remembers a different world. The Sado Estuary was once thick with seagrass meadows, and oyster harvesting thrived. “That’s where the work was. There were hundreds of fishermen and shellfish gatherers,” she says. That time feels almost mythic now. In Possanco, where she and her husband, Cândido, still go out to sea together, they are nearly alone. And in Carrasqueira, just down the coast, fewer than twenty remain.

“The new generation doesn’t care about the sea. They don’t care about fishermen,” she says, the sorrow unmistakable. “I try to pass on my knowledge, but there is no one left to receive it.” What she wants is simple and monumental at once: that someone, anyone, realises what is truly at risk of disappearing. “There is no one left to continue,” she insists. And she knows the reason. The work is uncertain, fragile. “A fisherman may catch a lot or nothing at all. You survive on what the sea gives. Once, there were no crabs anywhere. We didn’t know where they’d gone. And then, two years ago, suddenly there were crabs in abundance. We were stunned. Where had they been hiding all that time?”

After years working with Ocean Alive, an environmental organisation devoted to protecting marine forests, especially in the Sado, Cidália sees the sea with a clarity sharpened by experience. “We look at everything differently now. In the old days, we protected nothing. Any rubbish went overboard because we believed the sea floor was endless. None of us, not even me, imagined we were harming marine life.”

To care for the sea now is to fight for its species, for its balance—and for the survival of the craft that shaped her life. “It helps us tremendously,” she says.

Today, Cidália supplies her crabs to fishermen and intermediaries like Ismael Nunes in Carrasqueira. But more than that, she carries an entire way of life, one that survives only as long as there are hands willing to step into the water after hers, and a sea willing to receive them.