Tonnara del Secco

The land-based tuna trap, now disused, was a structure serving the sea tuna trap, with storehouses for keeping the nets, shelters for the boats and buildings to lodge the crews, as well as a plant for processing tuna.

The first official records of the San Vito tuna trap date back to 1412, when King Ferdinand allowed tuna fishing in the sea of San Vito.

In the sea of San Vito, the nets for catching the tuna that in spring crossed the waters of the Gulf of Castellammare in great numbers were lowered from the fifteenth century until 1968. Today the traditional “mattanza”, the term for the bloody ritual of killing the tuna in the so-called chamber of death, is no longer practised.

A few metres from the building are the remains of very ancient cetariae tanks, dating from the fourth century BC, in which fish, including tuna, was processed to make the prized garum (fish sauce), much appreciated by the Romans.