Spain's controversial plan for the world's first octopus farm has been abandoned

Plans for the world's first octopus farm have been abandoned. As the controversial project folds, several nations and US states are banning octopus farming before it even begins.

The room was dimly lit, and quiet – save for the sound of water tinkling as octopuses drifted lazily across one another in indoor pools. At the test centre for the world's first commercial octopus farm in Spain, this docile scene was proof, officials at seafood giant Nueva Pescanova told me in 2022, that the animals were perfectly happy in captivity, and thus suitable for breeding en masse. Before we departed, the centre's director patted one on the head.

Despite the apparent calm, the project was at the epicentre of an international furore. Since the proposals for the farm were announced in 2021, global protests raged – until, late last week, Nueva Pescanova declared that they were pulling the plug.

It follows a five-year legal battle over the farm's potential environmental impact with the port authority of Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, where the €65m ($74.5m/ £55.7m) plant was due to be built. Nueva Pescanova said in a statement that the plans had been halted based "exclusively on business and regulatory considerations", adding that they would not rule out renewing their efforts elsewhere in the future. Nueva Pescanova declined the BBC's request for further comment.

Campaigners, who held a celebration in Las Palmas at the news, see this not only as a landmark win but a potential first step in stopping commercial octopus farms from taking root more widely. In the past two years, the states of Washington and California have both pre-emptively banned octopus farming, while Spain, Mexico and Chile have put forward bills, too.

The economic potential of Nueva Pescanova's octopus venture was vast. The world's trade in fresh and chilled octopus meat was estimated at $198m (£147m) in 2024.

Yet from the outset, the project seemed doomed to fail. Though longstanding players in the Spanish seafood industry, the firm's plan to farm 3,000 tonnes of octopus meat annually came the year after the release of My Octopus Teacher, a Netflix documentary that became an Oscar-winning hit. 

In it, the unique relationship between a freediving documentarian and a female cephalopod highlighted the intelligence of the species – making the prospect of mass producing them in captivity deeply unpalatable to many. At the Las Palmas facility, some one million octopuses – solitary, nocturnal creatures – were to share pools and remain under constant light, before slaughter via freezing to temperatures of -3C (27F).

These plans posed "a serious moral issue", according to Lindsay Hamilton, professor of animal organisation studies at the University of York in the........

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