SÃO MATEUS, Portugal — Winter forced Emanuel Alves to remove his boat from the water at the port of São Mateus in the Azores, the Portuguese archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean. The 64-year-old fisher expressed concern about the giant network of marine protected areas that permeates the archipelago. “Where are we going to fish now?” he asked. The law establishing the Azores Marine Protected Areas Network was approved in October 2024 and took effect just recently, on Jan. 1 this year. The network now safeguards 30% of Azorean waters, 287,000 square kilometers (110,800 square miles) of seascape sheltering a rich array of marine life. Not two weeks later, on Jan. 15, the Azores Parliament voted to uphold a core provision of the MPA network, after it came under fire in recent months: No fishing inside the fully protected areas, which constitute half the vast network. Pico Mountain on Pico Island in the Azores, the tallest mountain in Portugal at 2,351 meters (7,713 feet). Image by Maria José Mendes for Mongabay. The vote effectively killed an earlier move to open these areas to pole-and-line tuna fishing that would have been “catastrophic and damaging to the region,” according to Luís Bernardo Brito e Abreu, coordinator of Blue Azores, a Portugal-based partnership between the Azores regional government, the U.S.-based nonprofit Waitt Institute and the Portugal-based Oceano Azul Foundation that began advocating for the establishment of the MPA network in 2019. “[The] criterion for a total protection area is indeed total protection; there…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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