In 2022 Nueva Pescanova, Spain’s largest fisheries business, announced it was investing €65 million (£56 million) in the world’s first industrial octopus farm and processing plant near the Canary Islands’ port of Las Palmas.
Despite the creatures being notoriously difficult to farm, the company predicted that by 2025 it would be producing 3,000 tons of octopus a year on Gran Canaria, according to The Guardian.
There followed years of controversy, with activists and scientists condemning the plans to farm an animal lauded for its apparent “intelligence,” which reached near-celebrity status five years ago thanks to the Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher.
Then, at the end of July 2026, Nueva Pescanova shelved plans for the farm. But why – and with what implications for the future of octopus farming?
A Guardian request for comment from Nueva Pescanova was met with silence but it told the Canary Islands’ port authority in a letter that it was pulling out for “business and regulatory” reasons.
Activists who have long opposed the farm were quick to claim a victory. “Social, scientific and political pressure has borne fruit, faced with this ethical and environmental atrocity,” Spain’s animal rights party, Pacma, said in a statement.
When the Guardian visited the company’s research center in 2023, Roberto Romero Perez, the marine biologist overseeing aquaculture at Nueva Pescanova, had said: “The truth is that we’re finding the mood to be a bit more hostile than expected.”
However, Silvia Fernandez Diaz, a journalist at Canarias7 who has covered the story from the start, said that far from being a mass movement, demonstrations on the island against the project rarely attracted more than a few dozen protesters.
“I believe the reality is that the farm didn’t go ahead because it wasn’t viable, not because of popular protest,” she said.
Sources at Las Palmas port authority confirmed that they had not been approached by anyone from Nueva Pescanova and no work had been done on building the farm.
Ian Gleadall, a marine biologist at Tohoku University in Japan who has spent 50 years researching octopuses, said he has been trying for two years to get a response from Nueva Pescanova about the Canary Islands project without success.
“The same thing happened here in Japan with the fisheries company Nissui,” he said. “The company said they’d cracked it and were going to be producing massive amounts of octopus but it never happened.”
Gleadall said octopuses have so far been virtually impossible to farm because the larvae of the common octopus spend at least 20 days floating in the water before they settle on the sea bed, making it difficult to move on to the next phase. Even then, he said, the hatchlings are so delicate that if anything goes wrong they die.
He added that another significant problem is what to feed the octopus: “One feed is a form of fish paste. But even if they eat it, they won’t go on eating it because octopus are very finicky – they don’t like to eat the same thing day in, day out.”
Gleadall said: “Even if you could solve the feed problem. You’d probably spend more on feed than the octopus was worth on the market.”
The ethical objections to octopus farming are that the creatures are solitary and antisocial, as well as the studies showing “compelling evidence” of sentience.
Richard Schweid, author of Life on the Octopus Farm, said many marine biologists hold that an octopus not only has nine brains but a mind. “[This is] something that we generally associate with higher orders of mammals, like dogs, cats, primates and humans,” he said.
The idea that the octopus is somehow like us – or at least like some of our pets – was fueled by Craig Foster’s film My Octopus Teacher, in which Foster appears to form a reciprocal relationship with a female octopus.
“The octopus is a prime candidate for humans to anthropomorphise because it is so smart, so responsive, and yet so different as to be essentially unreadable,” said Schweid.
Whatever the reasons for the end of the Spanish enterprise, no one has yet successfully farmed octopuses, aside from a small project in Mexico that cultivated a different species from the common octopus (Octopus vulgaris), found in the Mediterranean and Atlantic.
While octopuses may be safe from farming for now, the UN’s food agency, the Food and Agriculture Organization, estimates that about 370,000 tons of octopus are caught every year, much of them off Morocco and Mauritania. The principal markets are China and Japan, while Spain consumes about 40,000 tons a year, or almost 1kg per person.
And warming waters globally means octopuses are finding their way on to plates in new territories. Over the past two years, for example, the UK witnessed the biggest octopus bloom since 1950.
Octopus grow fast, have a short lifespan, are high in nutrients and are much in demand, so there are plenty of incentives to find a way to farm them.
“The conversion rate of what an octopus eats into a high-protein, low-fat meat is much better than any land-based livestock,” said Schweid.
He added: “Octopus is potentially a more environmentally sustainable farmed meat than beef, pork or poultry, and in a world shaped by rising temperatures it could become a meat of choice.”
In the meantime, the potency of the ethical argument against farming octopuses is likely to remain a strong weapon in the armory of those who oppose it.
“An octopus is a highly intelligent, naturally solitary wild animal,” said Charlotte Reid, a campaigner at Compassion in World Farming. “These are wild animals and they belong in the wild, not these underwater prisons,” she added.
