The tuna traps of Favignana

The old Florio tuna cannery on Favignana is enormous — far bigger than a small island’s fishing operation seems like it should require, with rusted machinery still standing in vast, echoing halls that once processed one of the Mediterranean’s most valuable seasonal catches. Walking through it, converted now into a museum, I found it harder than I expected to reconcile the scale of what used to happen here with how quiet the whole island felt on the ordinary summer afternoon I visited.

What the mattanza actually was

The mattanza was a traditional method of catching migrating bluefin tuna using a fixed system of nets, called a tonnara, that channeled schools of fish through a series of chambers into a final one — the camera della morte, or chamber of death — where fishermen, working from boats in tight coordination, would haul the trapped tuna up by hand. It was brutal, communal, and highly ritualized, with specific songs (cialome) sung by the crew to coordinate the physically demanding hauling, and it ran on Favignana for centuries as the economic backbone of the entire island.

Take a guided walking tour of Favignana’s village and former tuna farm if you want the history explained on-site rather than pieced together from museum placards, which is largely what I did on my own visit and found harder to follow than I expected.

The Florio cannery, up close

The Florio family, who industrialized and expanded the tonnara operation in the 19th century, built the massive processing complex that now houses the museum — vast rooms for salting, canning, and storing tuna at a scale that made Favignana genuinely important to the broader Mediterranean canned-fish trade for a period. Original machinery, some of it startlingly heavy industrial equipment for what I’d assumed would be a small-scale traditional operation, still sits in place, rusted but intact, giving a clearer sense of the operation’s real scale than any photograph had managed to communicate to me beforehand.

Why it stopped

The mattanza on Favignana wound down through the 20th century for reasons that will sound familiar to anyone who’s followed global fishing industry history: declining bluefin tuna populations from overfishing across the wider Mediterranean, changing EU fishing quotas, and the simple economics of industrial-scale trawling outcompeting a labor-intensive traditional method that depended on large communal crews. The last mattanza conducted in the traditional style on Favignana happened years ago now, and what exists today is a heritage story rather than an ongoing industry — a distinction worth understanding clearly before you visit, since some tourist material can imply a more active tradition than what’s actually still happening.

What’s real about the modern version

I don’t think this heritage framing is dishonest — the buildings, the machinery, and the historical record are all genuine, and the museum does a reasonable job contextualizing rather than romanticizing what was, after all, a difficult and dangerous livelihood for the people who did it. Some restaurants on the island still serve tuna dishes using traditional preparations, and tuna remains culturally central to Favignana’s identity even without an active mattanza — bottarga (cured tuna roe) and tuna preserved in oil, made using techniques descended from the historic canning operation, are both worth seeking out specifically here rather than assuming any Sicilian tuna product is equivalent.

The rest of the island, beyond the cannery

Favignana itself, beyond the tonnara story, is a flat, easily cycled island with genuinely striking turquoise water at spots like Cala Rossa, a former quarry-turned-swimming-cove with limestone walls rising directly from the sea. Discover Favignana’s historic center on foot pairs well with renting a bike for the rest of the island, which is how most visitors — myself included — actually get around, since the flat terrain makes it an easy, low-effort way to cover ground between swimming stops.

Should you visit expecting to see a mattanza?

No — and it’s worth being direct about that before you plan a trip around it. What you can see is the history, preserved thoughtfully in the Florio cannery museum, and a modern island economy that’s shifted from industrial tuna processing to tourism, diving, and cycling, with tuna remaining a proud, ever-present culinary theme rather than a living industry you’ll witness firsthand. Our Egadi Islands guide covers Favignana alongside Levanzo and Marettimo if you’re planning the wider archipelago, and Sicilian seafood: tuna, swordfish and sea urchin is worth reading if the food side of this story interests you as much as the history did me.

What I took away from the visit

Standing in that enormous, echoing cannery, it was hard not to think about how quickly an entire island’s defining industry can wind down once the resource it depends on and the economics around it both shift — and how what’s left, decades later, is a careful museum telling a story that an older generation of Favignana residents actually lived through as ordinary, difficult work. That’s a different thing from a tourist attraction built to entertain, and I left glad the distinction was handled as respectfully as it was.