The fishing quarter two kilometres from the Gibraltar frontier is called La Atunara, the tuna place. Its own tuna trap last fished in 1994, and today octopus brings in more than half the money at the auction hall. That gap between the name and the catch is worth understanding before you walk over for lunch, because almost every listing that sends visitors there promises almadraba bluefin, and almadraba bluefin is not what comes off these boats. [La Atunara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Atunara) is the fishing port quarter of La Linea de la Concepcion, on the Mediterranean side of the isthmus. It is older than the town it now belongs to: it appears in a Royal Order of 6 March 1634, which makes it the oldest settlement in what is now La Linea, and it grew up independently of both the town and the Rock. From the frontier it is a little over two kilometres, a half hour walk up the seafront or five minutes in a taxi. The beach in front of it runs about 1.5 km with an average width of 90 metres. The port is small, the boats are small, and the Rock is in the frame from almost every angle of the quay. An [almadraba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almadraba) is a maze of fixed nets set to intercept bluefin tuna on migration. The word comes from Andalusian Arabic and means roughly the place where you strike. The technique is around 3,000 years old on this coast, and the Dukes of Medina Sidonia held the monopoly on the Andalusian traps from the 12th century to the 19th. La Atunara's trap was set the other way round from the famous ones. The Atlantic almadrabas catch tuna swimming in to spawn. This one sat in the path of the fish coming back out of the Mediterranean, so it went in the water in July and August rather than in spring. It fished almost without a break from 1951 to 1994, then the bluefin collapse ended it. Two things survive. The National Almadraba Consortium put up its gear stores in 1956 in front of what is now the port. And in 2013 the quarter installed a steel tuna weather vane as a monument, which is the only tuna you are guaranteed to see there. > The name is a receipt for an industry that closed thirty years ago. Four traps still work in Cadiz province, and all four are on the Atlantic coast: Barbate, Conil, Zahara de los Atunes and Tarifa. The nearest of them to Gibraltar is Tarifa, 41 km from La Linea, about 48 minutes by road. The other three are further west again. They fish the spring run, roughly February to July, when the fish head in to spawn. The catch is lifted in a levanta and then cut up in a ronqueo, named for the noise the knife makes scraping along the backbone. More than twenty distinct cuts come off one fish, from the fatty ventresca and morrillo down to tarantelo and descargamento, and the [official Andalusian tourism board](https://www.andalucia.org/blog/post/el-atun-de-la-almadraba-una-tradicion-pesquera-y-gastronomica/) treats the whole business as heritage rather than just dinner. So a menu in La Atunara offering almadraba bluefin is not lying to you. It just means the fish came at least 41 km by road from somewhere else. Say what you like about that, but it is not local catch, and anyone selling it to you as the quarter's own living tradition is selling a story that ended in 1994. There is a reason the returning fish were the poor relation. Tuna heading into the Mediterranean in spring are fat and firm, because they barely feed on the spawning run and arrive with their reserves intact. The same animals coming back out in July are [lean and spent](https://culturabarbate.es/index.php/almadrabario/diccionario/item/atun-rojo), with drier meat and markedly lower commercial value. La Atunara spent forty three years catching the cheaper half of the migration, which is part of why it never came back when prices moved against it. The reason the traps are still working at all is that the eastern Atlantic bluefin stock came back. At its November 2025 meeting in Seville, ICCAT set the total allowable catch for eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin at 48,403 tonnes for 2026 to 2028, a rise of 19.3 per cent. The [European Commission](https://oceans-and-fisheries.ec.europa.eu/news/eu-secures-17-increase-bluefin-tuna-fishing-quota-iccat-annual-meeting-2025-11-27_en) put the EU's own share up by 3,661 tonnes to 25,164 tonnes a year. That is a real conservation result, and it is also why bluefin is back on menus at prices that are merely high rather than absurd. It did not bring the Atunara trap back, and nobody there expects it to. The [auction hall](https://grupos.us.es/puertosandaluces/pdf/Ficha_Atunara.pdf) covers 643.2 square metres and holds the auction floor, a labelling area where fish is tagged piece by piece, cold rooms and the port's own ice plant. There are two auctions a day. Buyers are mostly small: people from La Linea buying for market stalls and street selling, alongside wholesalers and a few working for exporters. Octopus accounts for more than half of the local revenue