Museo del Pescador - Puerto Santiago

This small museum is worth seeing for its facade alone .

Between 2002 and 2003, the French artist Bernard Romain , painter, sculptor and landscape artist, worked on the facade of the Fishermen's Museum, transforming it into an exceptionally plastic and three-dimensional tribute to the sea, the fisherman and tradition.

A high central window in the shape of an elongated trapezium is sandwiched between two slightly turned planes, the lower part of which is covered with tiles painted plaster, both representing the sea, and finally, at the top, a trompe l'oeil in false relief that depicts a wall on the left and the side of a fishing boat on the right.

On the wall hangs an authentic barge, the boat that supported fishing boats, from which a fisherman delivers a box full of fish to a man on the quay. To the right, another fisherman's sculpture balances on the edge of an anchored fishing boat. Three-dimensional shapes of large fish emerge from the bubbling foam at the center of both surfaces, strange and irreverent modern gargoyles dedicated to a local tradition that has almost completely disappeared.

In the Fisherman's Museum , which houses a bright art room for temporary exhibitions on the upper floor, you can also admire several canvases left by the painter, which are unfortunately not sufficiently appreciated and are confused with paintings that are often of poor quality.

On the ground floor is the Fisherman's Museum itself, where old nets, boats and various objects from the culture of the sea and fishing are exhibited on panels with images, maps and texts created in collaboration with the University of La Laguna.

Willem Vandenameele