Garda Fishermen Open New Fish Processing Facility After 60 Years
More than sixty years have passed since Floreste Malfer, the most prominent among scholars who studied the Garda ecosystem, lamented the fact that no facility had been built on the lake to process fish.
A prerequisite, that of processing, essential to enabling Benaco’s professional fishery to become a true industry, ensuring the survival of the tradition and providing adequate profitability.
Now the Cooperativa fra pescatori di Garda has succeeded in making concrete what until a few years ago still seemed an unrealizable dream: establishing a laboratory to process and preserve the catch.
The new headquarters will be inaugurated on Saturday at 11 with the blessing of the building, the ribbon-cutting, the greetings from officials, and then a reception, of course featuring lake fish.
The headquarters and renovation works
The headquarters of the Cooperativa have been set up in the old slaughterhouse building on via San Bernardo, transferred to the fishermen three years ago by the Comune for the sum of 165 million lire (the building dates back to the 1940s: its architectural lines are typical of the period).
The renovation works, commissioned by the fishermen at a cost exceeding 650 million lire, have made it possible to build refrigerated cells outside, a processing room, smoking and vacuum packaging areas on the ground floor, and offices and a meeting room upstairs.
From here and from the sales point on via Antiche Mura, the daily catch of the twenty-seven members of the Cooperativa will pass: an average of 170 tons of fish annually, with peak levels around 225 tons and minimum levels around 120 tons.
The new phase of professional fishing
The Cooperativa fra pescatori di Garda, founded in 1942, is now preparing to open a new chapter in the history of professional fishing on the lake.
For the first time, it will be possible to plan the price levels of the catch, allocating any surpluses to processing.
The Garda cuisine, which until now has partly overlooked lake fish due to the excessive variability in product quantity, no longer has any excuses: lake-based cuisine can once again become a true protagonist.
Initial experiments with smoked fish (lavarello, tench, eel, sardella) have yielded very promising results.
But what matters most is that with the opening of the new headquarters, the members of the Cooperativa are truly entering, bravely, into the logic of the market and entrepreneurship, guided passionately by Enrico Mario Monese, the president, and Beppino Monese, who acts as vice-president, along with Sergio Vernesoni, tireless director of the Garda cooperative.
Vernesoni, a former official of the Comune di Brenzone, was probably the person who pushed most for the realization of a processing facility for lake fish.
“There is demand for fish,” he kept repeating; “but consumers want it already filleted and perhaps vacuum-sealed, ready for cooking.”
Now the facility exists: the Garda professional fishing community turns a new page.
