Spain Scraps Its Octopus Farm as Wild Catch Tightens

Nueva Pescanova withdrew its Las Palmas octopus farm bid on 23 July 2026, ending a €65 million ($74.5 million) plan for 3,000 tonnes a year. Spain’s largest fisheries group told the Port Authority of Las Palmas it would no longer chase a concession opened in May 2021, and the port said it would archive the file.

Campaigners called the letter a win for a sentient, solitary animal. The plant never left paper, and Spain still eats about 40,000 tonnes of octopus a year, almost 1 kg a person, most of it pulled from Atlantic waters that FAO scientists already treat as overfished.

Nueva Pescanova Withdraws the Las Palmas Concession

The company wrote that it was no longer “opportune” to push the request as filed, given new demands from the Canary Islands’ environmental assessment commission. EFE, citing the port’s own note, recorded the decision as strictly “business and regulatory,” and the firm added that walking away did not concede that other methods or sites were dead.

El País put the cancelled payroll at 300 jobs. The site itself was more than 50,000 square metres on the Esfinge dock in the Port of La Luz, a land-based works meant to hold about one million common octopus, Octopus vulgaris, each year. BBC Future later reported that Nueva Pescanova would not rule out trying again somewhere else, and that it declined a further comment request.

Spain’s animal rights party Pacma said “social, scientific and political pressure has borne fruit.” Silvia Fernández Díaz, a Canarias7 reporter who followed the file from the start, told the Guardian the street picture was smaller. Demonstrations on the island, she said, “rarely attracted more than a few dozen protesters,” and she judged the project had failed because “it wasn’t viable, not because of popular protest.”

Both things can sit in the same week. Compassion in World Farming said a late push produced more than 43,000 emails to the port asking it to close the application, a digital pile that never needed a crowd on the quay.

The Company Missed Its Own Deadlines

The biology fight got the cameras. The paperwork is what actually stopped the works. Infobae, reconstructing the Canary Islands file, reported that in 2023 the regional government asked for a detailed environmental impact statement the company did not deliver, that a wastewater discharge permit was declared expired in January 2026 after missing papers, and that in May 2026 the port opened a lapse procedure of its own.

A simplified environmental review had already flagged bad smells near a passenger terminal and a risk to port water from organic waste. The regional commission then moved the project onto a fuller ordinary review, which Nueva Pescanova said had recast the scope, timetable and rules it first accepted. Beatriz Calzada, president of the Las Palmas port authority, told Spanish media it had become technically hard for the firm to meet every condition.

Port sources later told the Guardian that nobody from Nueva Pescanova had come back to start works, and that no building had begun. The Saturday after the letter, local groups still held a rally they had planned to demand the file’s closure, then turned it into a celebration.

THE LAS PALMAS FILE

1. July 2019: Nueva Pescanova says it has closed the common octopus reproductive cycle in captivity.
2. 8 January 2020: Spain’s oceanographic institute is granted patent ES 2714930 B2 for rearing common octopus paralarvae.
3. May 2021: the Port Authority of Las Palmas opens the marine-farm concession file.
4. 6 June 2024: Washington state’s octopus-farming ban takes effect.
5. 1 January 2025: California’s farming ban, and its ban on selling farmed octopus, take effect.
6. January 2026: the Canary Islands wastewater permit lapses after the company misses filings.
7. 23 July 2026: Nueva Pescanova withdraws the concession request and the port prepares to archive the file.

SeafoodSource, citing local reporting, noted the group had spent eight years on a culture method before that letter. The 2025 output date in the original pitch came and went with empty ground at Esfinge.

28,000 Tonnes of Fish for 3,000 Tonnes of Meat

The public case against the farm was intelligence. The quieter arithmetic is diet. Octopus is a hunter. In tanks it still needs crabs, fish and the meals milled from them, and that is where the climate-protein pitch starts to leak.

Richard Schweid, author of Life on the Octopus Farm, has said octopus turns what it eats into high-protein, low-fat meat more efficiently than cattle, pigs or chickens, and that in a hotter world it “could become a meat of choice.” Compassion in World Farming ran the same Las Palmas design the other way and, in a 2025 note on carnivorous aquaculture, counted 28,000 tons of wild-caught fish in the first year to produce 3,000 tons of octopus meat, a haul it said would come from forage fisheries in West Africa, South America and Southeast Asia.

THE FEED BILL CIWF COUNTED

• Wild fish in: 28,000 tonnes in the first year of full output.
• Octopus out: 3,000 tonnes of meat, the plant’s stated capacity.
• Animals on site: about one million common octopus a year in communal tanks.

Ian Gleadall, a marine biologist at Tohoku University who has studied octopuses for 50 years, put the money problem in a shorter line for the Guardian. Even if a paste feed worked, he said, “you’d probably spend more on feed than the octopus was worth on the market,” because the animals are “very finicky” and will not keep eating the same mash.

Campaigners also attacked the planned kill. The Telegraph reported an ice-slurry method at minus 3C. Compassion in World Farming said undercover footage of wild-caught animals in icy water showed deaths that took at least ten minutes. There is still no widely accepted humane slaughter standard for octopus at farm scale.

Morocco and Mauritania Still Supply the Plates

Kill the farm and the plates do not go empty. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates about 370,000 tonnes of octopus are caught each year, much of it off Morocco and Mauritania, with China and Japan the main buyers. Spain, whose own wild beds have thinned, now leans on those two coasts.

A 2025 FAO/CECAF working-group extract on north-west African cephalopods listed the three Atlantic Octopus vulgaris stocks that feed that trade as overexploited. Dakhla landed 25,461 tonnes in 2023 against a 2019-to-2023 average of 31,285, and the group said to hold catches near 25,400 tonnes. Cap Blanc landed 36,426 tonnes, and the group called for a cut to 29,000 tonnes, about 20 percent below the latest year. Senegal-Gambia was down at 2,300 tonnes and still classed as overexploited, with a call for a much deeper cut in fishing pressure.

GLOBEFISH market notes in 2025 and 2026 described a tight, pricey trade rather than a glut. Mauritania’s 2026 quota was held at 29,000 tonnes while 2025 export prices rose by nearly 15 percent, the notes said. Unit prices for octopus the European Union bought from Morocco and Mauritania were up about 20 percent in January to August 2025 against a year earlier. Morocco still raised some seasonal quotas after rest periods, including a 32,940-tonne winter quota south of Sidi L’Ghazi for 2026, up 27 percent on the prior season, but the stock labels did not flip from overexploited to healthy.

Forbes Africa, citing researchers Assane Dedah Fall and Berchie Asiedu, has estimated that some 65,000 Mauritanians work in octopus catching and about 200,000 more sit in the wider chain. That labour force, not a tank in Gran Canaria, is what fills Spanish stews when a farm file dies.

Warm water is also moving the animal onto new menus. The Guardian noted that the United Kingdom has just seen its largest octopus bloom since 1950. Demand is spreading while the old fishing grounds are already marked as overused.

Why the Common Octopus Resists a Farm

Common octopus larvae, called paralarvae, spend at least 20 days adrift before they settle on the seabed, Gleadall said, and the hatchlings are so delicate that “if anything goes wrong they die.” That pelagic window is the commercial wall. Grow-out of wild juveniles is old hat. Closing the cycle at industrial density is not.

Japan has spent a decade on the same wall. In June 2017 Nippon Suisan Kaisha, known as Nissui, said it had hatched about 140,000 eggs at its Oita Marine Biological Technology Center and hoped farmed animals would reach restaurants by 2020. Gleadall’s verdict on that promise is blunt: “The company said they’d cracked it and were going to be producing massive amounts of octopus but it never happened.”

Later Japanese trials, reported by SeafoodSource in 2021, used upwelling tanks, crab zoeae instead of brine shrimp, and cubicle dividers to slow cannibalism. Of 156 juveniles, 73 lived 10 months (a 46.8 percent survival rate) and 65 reached a 500 g sale size; 25 passed 1 kg. Those are lab numbers, not a port factory.

THE FARMING BOTTLENECKS

• The drift stage: Paralarvae float for weeks, miss sinking feed, and die in ordinary tanks unless flow and prey are tuned with lab care.
• The diet: They start on live crab larvae and other tiny prey; adults then refuse a boring paste, so feed bills climb faster than the meat price.
• The crowding: Octopuses are solitary and eat each other when they can see neighbours, which is why Japanese teams built cubicles and why welfare groups call communal tanks a non-starter.
• The kill: Ice slurry at minus 3C was the industrial method on the table, with no agreed humane standard behind it.

A small Mexican project has cultured a different species, the Guardian noted, not Octopus vulgaris. That exception is still not a Canary Islands factory.

Washington Banned Farming Before Spain Built a Tank

While the Las Palmas file sat, other governments moved to outlaw a business that did not yet exist. Washington’s House Bill 1153, the first such state law, passed 70-27 in the House and 29-20 in the Senate and took effect on 6 June 2024 as a prohibition on octopus farming. Rep. Strom Peterson, who carried it, told BBC Future he had expected years of persuasion and instead watched the bill “take off rather quickly” after My Octopus Teacher.

California followed. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 3162 on 29 September 2024. From 1 January 2025 it is a crime in the state to farm octopus for food, and a business may not sell, hold or move farmed animals, a ban on farmed octopus sales written into Fish and Game Code section 15007.5. The statute calls octopuses “highly intelligent, curious, problem-solving animals” that feel pain and fear.

In June 2025 Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, with Sen. Lisa Murkowski, introduced the OCTOPUS Act, which would stop U.S. agencies licensing commercial octopus farms and add a ban on importing farmed octopus, with civil penalties up to $100,000 per violation. Accredited zoos and research permits are carved out. The bill is still in the Senate Commerce Committee. It is already the shape of the next fight: not only tanks on U.S. soil, but frozen product at the border.

That legal weather is part of what Nueva Pescanova meant by “regulatory” even though the Canary Islands letter pointed at local environmental paperwork. A factory built for export into markets that are writing bans in advance is a harder asset to finance, and the company said so in the dry language of a concession withdrawal.

A Public Patent Stays With Spanish Labs

The tanks at Esfinge are off. The science is not. The Instituto Español de Oceanografía, now IEO-CSIC, still lists a patented paralarva culture procedure, ES 2714930 B2, granted on 8 January 2020 after more than 20 years of work split between its Canary Islands and Vigo centres. The inventors include Ricardo Tur Estrada, Pedro M. Domingues and Eduardo Almansa. The institute says the method swaps costly crab zoeae for amphipods and caprellids taken from Galician mussel rafts, then tunes light and temperature until the larvae settle. It describes the patent as granted and in experimental use, ready to license.

Almansa, one of the named inventors, said the team had turned complex biology into a technology ready to hand to industry. Fast Company, visiting Vigo in late 2025, reported that Tur and former Nueva Pescanova aquaculture chief David Tronosco had left to form a consultancy, Green Parrot Aqua Solutions, and had begun an offshore pilot they call Octopus Prime. The company can drop a port file and still leave people who want another try.

Compassion in World Farming treated 23 July as the end of the argument it came to win. Dr Elena Lara, its senior research and policy adviser, was in Las Palmas for the street celebration.

After years of pressure, this is a huge victory for octopuses, our oceans and everyone who joined us in campaigning to stop the world’s first octopus farm. Octopuses are intelligent, wild animals, not products to be caged in factory farms.

Dr Elena Lara, Senior Research and Policy Advisor, Compassion in World Farming

The group’s own tally was three research reports, more than 43,000 supporter emails, and more than 130 NGO and scientist signatures. It posted the same day.

https://x.com/ciwf/status/2080258331394842804

Lara also said governments should now ban octopus farming outright, the step Washington and California have already taken and the step Eurogroup for Animals wants from the European Commission. Charlotte Reid, a CIWF campaigner, put the welfare line without the Brussels paperwork: “These are wild animals and they belong in the wild, not these underwater prisons.”

On X the victory posts drowned out the catch data. Almost nobody in that thread was talking about Dakhla or Cap Blanc, or about the 40,000 tonnes Spain will keep buying from boats. The sharper split is the one the IEO page makes obvious: a public larval method still exists, Nueva Pescanova’s letter leaves other sites open, and the animal that looks like efficient meat remains the one industrial aquaculture has not actually learned to raise.

In its letter to the port, the company said the retreat did not recognise that other technical, environmental or location options were unviable.

Frequently Asked Questions

How large was the planned Gran Canaria octopus farm?

The works were drawn at just over 50,000 square metres on the Esfinge dock in the Port of Las Palmas, with a headline output of 3,000 tonnes a year, more than 10 percent of Spain’s octopus supply as local papers counted it, and a first-year headcount of about one million animals in land-based tanks using both recirculating water and an open circuit for different life stages.

Why do common octopus larvae block industrial farming?

Paralarvae drift for at least 20 days and die if flow, light and live prey are even slightly wrong; Japanese work has put the prey bill at roughly 18 million swimming-crab zoeae to obtain 10,000 settled juveniles, a ratio that is manageable in a research hall and ruinous as a port production line.

Which U.S. rules already outlaw octopus farms?

Washington’s HB 1153 has banned octopus aquaculture since 6 June 2024, and California’s Fish and Game Code section 15007.5, in force from 1 January 2025, also makes it illegal to sell, possess or transport octopus that is the product of aquaculture, a sales bar Washington’s first law did not write in the same words.

What slaughter method was on the Las Palmas plans?

Nueva Pescanova’s industrial design pointed to ice slurry at minus 3C, and Compassion in World Farming said filmed wild-caught animals took at least ten minutes to die in icy water; no EU-wide, species-specific humane killing protocol for farmed octopus has been adopted to replace that method.

Did Spanish scientists actually close the octopus life cycle?

IEO-CSIC’s 2020 patent ES 2714930 B2 covers a validated lab protocol for taking common octopus paralarvae through settlement, with six named inventors and two oceanographic centres, and the institute still lists the patent as granted and in experimental exploitation rather than as a factory licence already running at Las Palmas.