Dive into Portugal’s sardines
Tourists who love the fish can take a tour of one of the best canneries
All vacation is in some way an observation of other people working while you do not. A stay at a hotel bears witness to maids and hosts; dinner sees chefs, busboys and waiters; an excursion requires a tour guide, a driver, a boat mechanic if you’re lucky. But there’s a peculiarity in going to a factory to watch locals do hard work while you escape your own job.
Porto, Portugal’s secondlargest city, is the capital of one of the country’s major industries, fish canning. Canned sardines are having a moment in the food world. With exquisitely decorated tins, perceived if questionable sustainability and the decadence of being drenched in oil, they’ve earned a devoted following among youngish people who love them. At Conservas Pinhais e Cia in Matosinhos, a fish-canning factory near Porto, visitors are invited to see that their new favorite treat is, in fact, a very old operation.
Founded in 1920 by two brothers and two outside partners, Pinhais is considered one of the best tinned-fish purveyors in the saturated Portuguese market. The factory is one of the few that survived a great shift in sardine production to West Africa, where over half of all sardines are now canned. The sardines are favored among diners in the fish-centric city, and are a favorite across Europe, though U.S. customers might be more familiar with the company’s international label, Nuri, which is available at specialty stores and fine groceries. The fish are known for their high quality and perfect seasoning — and now, on a tour of the working factory, sardine fans can see exactly how it’s done.
The workforce is almost all female, a tradition set by the fact that, historically, men went to sea while women stayed behind and dealt with the catch. It is not uncommon for generations of women to work in the factory, with mothers, daughters and aunts finding steady jobs canning. Indeed, the tour of the sardine factory begins with a video of a Portuguese daughter, waiting for her father to make it through a storm. (He does.)
“That film is dedicated to all the families of our fishermen,
for the stress they endure,” said the guide, Olga Santos, at the start of a recent tour.
The 90-minute tour, which Pinhais introduced in November 2021, starts in an office originally built in 1926 and complete with rotary phones and a pulley system, on which orders would be attached to a rope and sent down to the factory floor.
After the video of the fishermen’s families and one about how the fish’s seasonings are sourced, the screen rises to reveal a window on the working factory. You leave the impeccably decorated display area — the founders shaped the stairwell so that when you look up in the factory foyer you see the
outline of a sardine — for the nitty-gritty work area.
After donning protective coverings, you enter along a walkway that runs around a mostly open floor, divided only by arched windows. The first thing you see is a table of women cutting chile peppers, bay leaves and pickles to fill the spicy versions of the company’s four varieties of sardines, which are offered either in tomato sauce or olive oil.
In the next area, the fish are bathed in salt water before having their heads and tails cut off, which leaves some of the workers’ aprons stained with blood and guts. All extra parts go to animal food manufacturers, Santos tells us.
After the whacking, the remaining bodies are placed in a vertical container in individual slots that makes it look as though dozens of headless sardines are attending a lecture in a small hall. The auditorium is sent through a shower before entering a large oven, where the fish are cooked for 15 minutes. Then comes the delicate packing of the fish into their tins, by hand, before the tins are filled with olive oil using machinery introduced a few years ago. In a promotional book you can purchase in the gift store, a few factory workers lament the new oil machine, remembering fondly getting “really covered” with the olive oil, which comes from the nearby Douro Valley.
The tins are sealed by machine, which accounts for some of the loud noise on the floor. Also loud is the constant flow of water, which rings throughout the factory as the sardines are washed several times before they’re cooked.
Finally, everything is packaged with lightning speed in what amounts to wrapping paper. You’re given a chance to try this yourself after exiting the tour and unwrapping yourself from the PPE, but it’s impossible to match the dexterity of the wrappers on the factory floor who wield the yellow, green and blue papers with astonishing ease.
Santos told us that “on a good day,” the women canning often sing. And, as we entered the factory floor, the cannery really was in full chorus, though the words were impossible to make out over the sound, even if you did speak Portuguese. Whether the singing is truly spontaneous is hard to know, but the myth of the women singing comes up when talking to locals familiar with the factory. Regardless, it seems just as likely that singing is the best way to communicate over the loud hum of sardine canning.
The tour ends with a sampling of the sardines that you’ve just seen canned, paired with bread from a local bakery. The sardines, it must be said, are delicious.“I love sardines,” Sandra van Diessen, 57, visiting from the Netherlands, told me enthusiastically after the tour, as we debated the merits of deboning our free samples. (You are not supposed to, Santos told us, but the three of us laughed that we all did anyway, out of habit more than necessity.) After opening last fall and, with about 70 tours offered a week in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French, the factory has so far hosted 2,821 sardine fans.