E
very year, the llampuga returns in the fall, like an old friend you can always count on. In Mallorca, this migratory fish has its aficionados, its recipes, its secrets... and now its song. An unexpected tribute to one of the island's most modest — but most iconic — symbols. As Pere Andreo sings, “the llampuga never deceives anyone”: it allows itself to be caught without resistance, and this is undoubtedly what has made it so popular on the island. It carries with it the memory of a time when fishing was done without great means, when people lived off what the sea had to offer. No lobsters, almost no prawns, nor any of the fish that we now take for granted on the market stalls.
Since childhood, like all Mallorcans, Pere Andreo has heard people say “Es tempio de llampuga” as soon as September arrives. “There was a kind of mystery surrounding the llampuga, something magical,” he says. “Where do the llampugas come from? Why do they come?” His curiosity led him to investigate the annual event for the column he writes in “El Setmanari Sóller,” one of the oldest newspapers in Europe. “I'm interested,” he explains, “in everything that escapes the pages of the news: popular culture, ethnography, ethnology, in short, stories that newspapers hardly ever tell anymore,” he explains. “One day, I was riding my motorbike and I came across this stone sculpture of a llampuga in the port of Sóller, and the lyrics to the song just came to me spontaneously during the very short journey to Sóller. I started thinking about it, I thought of a melody, and everything just fell into place," explains the young architect, who has just released his first album.
The descriptive and poetic text follows the fish's migration from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. An ode to an age-old cycle, sung from the animal's point of view — always on the move, elusive, “never disturbing anyone.”
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