From January 10, 2026, recreational fishing in Spain will take an unprecedented leap towards digital control. All recreational fishermen who go out to sea in external waters will have to register and report their fishing days through the official PescaREC application, even when they return without a single catch. The measure, promoted by the European Union, seeks to have for the first time continuous data on a widespread but little quantified activity. And it has raised questions from amateur fishermen in Ibiza and Formentera as well as in the Peninsula.
What exactly does the measure oblige
The obligation will affect recreational fishing in external waters (state competence) and, depending on what each autonomous community decides, it could also be extended to inland waters. When amateurs catch
The change comes in a particularly sensitive territory such as the Balearic Islands, with 52,512 recreational fishing licenses in force, 11,191 of them linked to boats, and highly coveted species such as raor, llampuga, squid, octopus, déntol or verderol in the spotlight of management.
The deployment of PescaREC coincides with the IEO-CSIC’s RECRIEO project, which is conducting 120 annual surveys in the Balearic Islands to measure actual recreational fishing activity.
More “control” than science
The organized recreational fishermen of Ibiza strongly reject this measure Diego Alcalde, spokesman for the platform Pereyna de Pesca Recreativa y Náutica de las Pitiüses, considers that the obligation to use an app every time you go fishing is “too exaggerated“.
“Imagine a person who has his job and the little free time he has goes fishing and has to declare catches in an app… You practically have to be a NASA engineer to go fishing,” he protests.
Alcalde distinguishes between the control assumed by professional fishing, which lives from this activity, and the reality of recreational fishing, which goes out “for self-consumption” and for leisure. He defends that angling or spearfishing practiced in the Pitiusas is “kilometer zero” and very selective, compared to gear such as trawling or longlines, which can generate much more mortality of protected species.
Although he says he is in favor of having scientific data on recreational fishing, he questions whether the app goes in that direction: “If you tell me it’s for scientific purposes, I’ll buy it. But then we will have to invest in scientists and biologists going out to sea with recreational fishermen in different seasons of the year, to see what is caught, what currents are affected, what new species appear… These are serious studies. The other thing is more of a control measure”.
“What the administration has to do is invest in being closer to the taxpaying citizen. Go out fishing with us, see the real impact. Do not just implement an app and say that it is mandated by Brussels,” concludes Alcalde.
In Formentera they support the control, but not the form
In Formentera, the position of recreational fishermen is less frontal. The skipper of the island’s recreational fishermen, Paco Mayans, recalls that they have been declaring catches in marine reserves for some time and that, in this sense, the novelty is to extend the obligation to the rest of the areas.
“As of today, we are already doing it within the reserves. If we do it outside, it won’t be a problem, as long as it can be done easily and conveniently,” he explains.
Mayans does not dispute the substance -the need to know what is being fished to better manage the species-, but the way in which it is being approached. On the one hand, because it is being done through an app. “Believe it or not, not everyone uses smartphones or tablets. People of a certain age are going to have very important, if not impossible, problems,” he warns.
That’s why he asks that the use of the app be an option and not an imposition: “There should be a system via a paper form. It is filled out and delivered to a specific place. The mobile should be an alternative, not the only way.”
On the other hand, remember that in the Balearic Islands there is already an app to declare catches in the reserves (Diario de Pesca Recreativa). The doubt is whether PescaREC will coexist with that system or integrate it. “It would be a bit of a hassle to have to use two different apps, one inside and one outside the reserve. If I’m fishing in a reserve, move 500 meters and go outside… do I have to make two different declarations? That seems absurd to us,” he says.
Mayans explains that they have spoken unofficially with the Directorate General of Fisheries and that not even the administration itself is clear yet what species, areas and circumstances will be obliged to declare. “In principle we are not opposed to the declaration, but we are opposed to the way it is being done, without clarifying how it is done and where. Between now and January 10 there must be changes and details that are not clear must be known,” he points out.
Professionals applaud the control
From the Cofradía de Pescadores de Formentera (Fishermen’s Guild of Formentera), the main skipper Iván Pérez sees the arrival of PescaREC as good news. And almost as something that comes late. He recalls that professionals have been reporting their catches and fishing effort for years, and that this information is the basis for many management decisions.
“That serves to control the state of the sea: if one year you catch a lot and the next year you catch less and less, something is going on,” he explains.
For him, the app responds to an ultimatum from Brussels and is preferable to more drastic measures: “Either they do it through an app or what Brussels imposes will be worse. It has already happened in professional fishing. They could end up demanding satellite positioning for everyone, limiting licenses or banning certain species without knowing what recreational fishermen catch”.
The skipper from Formentera believes that part of the problem is that recreational fishing has not generated historical catches that allow him to defend his interests. However, Pérez admits that older people or those without internet access may have more difficulties and need paper options.
Perez points out a current imbalance between professional and recreational fishing: “We will be about 200 or 300 professional boats in the Balearics. In recreational fishing there are about 11,000 boats and about 50,000 licenses. Even if each one catches a little, when you add up those licenses, it increases a lot,” he argues.
Against this view, Diego Alcalde replies from the recreational side that the comparison between the number of licenses and the real weight of leisure fishing is misleading: “You can not make a mathematical calculation because you see that there are 50,000 licenses in the Balearic Islands and you think that these 50,000 people go out at once every day. Between the summer, when many areas are saturated, the winter storms and the closed areas where only professionals can enter, the real effort of recreational fishing is much lower,” he remarks.
In this line, he exemplifies: “This year I have gone out about 20 times throughout the year”.
And he puts the focus back on what, in his opinion, is lacking: well-funded scientific field campaigns, with biologists on board, to measure the real impact of rods and spearguns on key species such as raor, llampuga, squid, octopus, déntol or verderol in the waters of Ibiza and Formentera.
