Portugal's Conservas

On the night of June 12, Lisbon smells of sardines. It is the eve of the feast of Santo António, the saint the city treats as its own patron, and the historic neighborhoods fill with street parties where grilled sardines are a fixture. The sardine is the city's fish, and the fish that Portugal has been sealing into tins since the second half of the nineteenth century. Behind the Portuguese tin is a factory system that grew to dozens of plants in a single town, worked by women at the packing benches, and then mostly closed.

The history of tinned fish guide explains how the tin was invented and the A Day at the Cannery guide shows how one is made. This is the Portuguese side of the story: where the canneries stood, who worked in them, and what happened to them.

The first factories

Canning arrived in the second half of the nineteenth century, led at first by foreign industrialists. A history of cannery architecture from the University of Porto describes an early phase dominated by Greek and Italian industrialists, working from southern ports where tuna and anchovy were plentiful. A tuna-in-olive-oil factory was already working at Vila Real de Santo António, in the Algarve, by 1865.

The same study, drawing on an earlier account, credits a French industrialist named Delory, said to have arrived in Setúbal in 1880, with what may have been the first sardine cannery in Portugal. Other French canners followed, the study notes, as the sardine shoals off their own Atlantic coast declined.

The cannery towns

Three towns stand out in the story of the industry. Setúbal, on its own estuary south of the capital, was where the sardine cannery took hold in Portugal from the 1880s. Matosinhos, the fishing port beside Porto, planned an industrial district behind its harbor at the start of the twentieth century, aimed above all at canned sardines, and just after the Second World War its grid of industrial streets held more than fifty fish factories. In the Algarve, Portimão once had twenty-three canneries, among them the factory of Feu Hermanos. A former cannery there now houses the Portimão Museum.

Who packed the tins

The work was split between two trades. In the early factories, the Porto study explains, the tins themselves were made by hand by soldadores, solderers who formed a separate class of worker, while the cannery workforce proper was made up entirely of women. On the factory floor the fish was headed and cleaned, washed and cooked, then packed into the empty tins by the women at the benches. After packing came the oil, the seal and the sterilizer.

The great spread of factories came between the First World War and the 1930s. The export peak arrived with the Second World War and lasted into the 1950s. Machines came in gradually: oiling, once done by hand from a tub, passed to automatic oiling machines from the 1940s, and the lead-soldered closure gave way to automatic seamers.

What remains

In Matosinhos only two of those fifty-odd factories remain, and the processing plants that once lined the river at Portimão are all gone or turned to other uses. Pinhais, founded in Matosinhos in 1920, was still oiling its tins by hand from a tub when the Porto study was written, and the company describes its process as almost entirely manual. Portugal kept eating fish. The EU's fisheries market observatory put the country's apparent consumption at 53.61 kilograms per person in 2023.

A timeline of Portuguese canning

The dates below are gathered from the Porto architectural study, a history of the Matosinhos canneries, accounts of the Portimão factories and a Portuguese canning-industry site. Sources disagree on which cannery came first. A Portuguese canning-industry site dates Setúbal's first factory to 1854. The Porto study gives 1880 for the first sardine cannery there, and cites a 1923 account of a small sardine-in-tins factory at Peniche in 1864.

Set side by side, the dates put tuna in the far south and sardines at Setúbal and Peniche among the early landmarks, with the great sardine district at Matosinhos following in the twentieth century.

The illustrated tin

José Gourmet works with a roster of more than fifty illustrators whose drawings appear on its packaging, as the José Gourmet sardines in Azores butter guide describes. For choosing among species and styles of tinned fish, start with the Tinned Fish Complete Guide.

Four ways to serve a tin

On bread, cold. A sardine or a mackerel on a slice of good bread, a squeeze of lemon, a few slices of raw onion, salt. Of the toasts in the sardine toast five ways recipe, the one with butter is closest to this.

With potatoes. Boiled potatoes, still warm, with tinned tuna or sardines flaked over, olive oil, vinegar, onion, parsley and a chopped hard-boiled egg. A summer lunch, and a use for the oil in the tin.

In rice. Arroz de atum: rice cooked with onion, garlic, tomato and a tin of tuna, the oil from the tin going into the pan first. A quick dinner.

At the table, as the meal. Two or three tins opened on the table, bread, olives, a plate of cheese and a bottle of cold vinho verde. The no-cook dinner party menu is this idea with the shopping list attached.

Bringing it home

For the June feast, without the street grills: a tin of sardines, a slice of grilled bread, raw onion, lemon, and a glass of something cold and green. Open the tin at the table, eat from it, and keep the oil for the bread. For the pantry: three Portuguese tins, one sardine, one mackerel, one tuna, and a bottle of olive oil. Once a tin is open, the guide to how long tinned fish lasts after opening covers what to do with the rest. For a gift: a José Gourmet tin, such as the sardines in extra virgin olive oil (shop José Gourmet Sardines in Extra Virgin Olive Oil).

Sources & Further Reading

• Hugo Nazareth Fernandes, University of Porto: a history of the architecture of the Portuguese fish-canning industry
• Portus: Pinhais, 100 years in the fish preserve industry of Matosinhos
• Conservas de Portugal: the Portuguese canneries by location
• Tomorrow Algarve: the lifeblood of Portimão for generations, sardines
• European Route of Industrial Heritage: Portimão Museum
• Visit Portugal: Festas de Lisboa
• Visit Lisboa: Noite de Santo António, 12 and 13 June
• EUMOFA: Portugal country profile
• José Gourmet: Ilustradores
• The Pantry Dispatch: José Gourmet Sardines in Azores Butter
• The Pantry Dispatch: How Tinned Fish Was Invented