Since We Arrived Back In The UK,

I have often visited cemeteries,

like this one, with both my normal and infrared cameras, with of course the graves of people, but here is a different cemetery,

a cemetery of anchors, photograph Tolbxela/Flickr, at one time the Bluefin Tuna fishing industry along the Algarve Coast was huge, but the fishing has stopped, the fishing trade upon which more than 80 fishermen and their families depended, died when industrial fishing became a thing, it quickly made this traditional fishing method obsolete, the locals abandoned their old installations, burying the hundreds of anchors than once supported their networks of nets behind Barril Beach, and the site became known as the Anchor Cemetery, (O Cemitério das Âncoras), the rusty anchors have remained there ever since, as a symbolic memorial for the defunct traditional tuna fishing,

in 2016, Joana Madeira Rebelo, a master’s student in conservation and restoration at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, documented the Anchor Cemetery of Barril Beach and found that it consisted of 248 anchors in various degrees of degradation, She warned that this now iconic site will cease to exist in a matter of decades, if measures to protect it are not taken, Rebelo said that, while all anchors are heavily rusted, some are actually very fragile, and at risk of breaking apart, while others maintain their structural integrity and can be preserved, She identified chlorine as the main cause of the anchors’ degradation, as it penetrates the anchors and causes the iron to detach, without help, like the tuna, the anchors will no longer be here, what a strange cemetery.