Some of the boys and girls who in this new millennium represent the "Trial at the Bottom of the Sea" came to life when other fish-people publicly expressed their dissatisfaction with the aggression suffered by the marine environment back in 1982.
The "Judgment" was born as a metaphor in defense of life, of the environment in which we live and that we seem to appreciate so little. The old murga that "Los Parrandistas" sang was the necessary excuse to publicly denounce a situation that, if it was bad then, is no better now.
Pollution has grown in the bay, the carracachos have disappeared as a result.
Muergos are practically extinct after an abusive fishing with chemical, aggressive and irrational methods that poison and suffocate the area. Trainas and gillnets continue to do their thing. The purification of wastewater in the different municipalities on the shore of the bay continues to be nil. The little mouthful that remains is crushed in spring, summer, autumn ... Ecological disasters hit us anywhere in the world.
Twenty-three years have passed but we continue like yesterday. The media wake us up every day with polluting spills, sinking oil tankers, lost or damaged nuclear submarines that threaten their radioactive cargo .
The message that the "Trial" is trying to convey remains, therefore, in force. It is aimed at a population that lives in direct relationship with the sea. In one way or another it conditions us. What would Santoña be without its fishing fleet, without industrial or artisanal anchovies and bonito, without rods and tackle on the machinas, on the breakwaters, on the bridges or on the breakwater? What would the bay be without the species that can still be fished? What would it be without clams, without snails, without oysters, without mussels, chambers, shoemakers, stuffed, cuttlefish, cuttlefish, red mullet, alligots, seabass, shrimp, durdos, arrayatados, pouts, paint tails, witches, furniture, stripes, scrapers, save us , octopuses, porretanos, limpets, doradas, ... What to do, as has already been tried, an artificial fish farm when we have it natural? The bay , the sea in general, is an ecosystem that produces immense but not inexhaustible wealth . Let's exploit it rationally, without unnecessary aggression, without crushing it. Let it produce respecting its nature, fishing by hand.
The "Judgment at the Bottom of the Sea" is the forum used by the mute inhabitants of the sea to tell us through the voice that we lend them, that they depend on us, on our coherence and on our respect for an environment that it is common so that neither they nor we disappear from planet Earth.
The visual arts and external beauty that surround the representation of the "Trial" with its "Paseo del Reo" and the "Burial of the Sea Bream" would not make sense if its reason for being is lost : its expressiveness, its denunciation, that reversal of roles that It is the essence of Carnival, that magic that makes the fish speak with our voice to tell us about their problems, which are ours. To tell us about those sailors, boatmen and shellfish that live with them. So that we do not forget historical events that occurred in these waters, so that, ultimately, we do not break our relationship with the environment in which we live due to a poorly understood progress that can lead us to irretrievably lose the privileged environment that we have been fortunate to. to know and enjoy.