The chef Ángel León (Aponiente***, Cádiz) was unable to travel from his favourite corner of the planet due to a domestic accident, but he wanted to take part in the meeting of the marshes to highlight the importance of the marshes, an ecosystem that gave rise to life and yet is being severely affected. To make his point, he handed the microphone over to biologist Ángel Martín, with whom he works hand in hand at the restaurant. "The marshes are humanity's defence, and that is why we must support their recovery and conservation," he insisted, explaining that at Aponiente they study them from a subtidal perspective, "taking care of the fauna that cannot be seen, but which has enormous nutritional value"; from the intertidal, where prawns, lobsters, sea bream and sea bass grow; and from the supratidal, "where our project to recover the halophilic plants is based".

A great admirer of the work carried out by his team, the chef then handed over to Ignasi Mateo, from Aponiente's R&D department, who develops important projects aimed at achieving the restaurant's self-sufficiency and sustainability, such as "making seawater drinkable so that it can be used in the kitchen, respecting the habitat of all the products we serve in the restaurant and even cleaning the surfaces and dishes". To do this, they use a filtration system based on nano-sized cavities that eliminate pathogens from the water, even the smallest viruses. He also described how they introduce gases such as oxygen into the water, which "improves the organoleptic characteristics, texture and even the shelf life of the fish", he warned.

Ángel León's dream

And as examples of its application, León synthesised some of the uses of his seawater in some of its states, such as the sea breeze in a bubble of evaporated plankton extract, the ice in an oyster frozen to one degree below zero, or the salt on a fish, recalling the day he saw a fellow countryman put salt in the gills of a live fish before throwing it into the ashes of some halophilic plants. "The fish salted itself with the pumping of its heart, and that's how I knew that salting and cooking a fish was the best thing a chef could dream of," he exclaimed.

The excited chef took the floor again to explain his passion for the natural environment that now fills his life, the Cadiz marshes of San José, "a place that was abandoned, the most beautiful place in the world, was what brought me here", and to ask for the administration's help in finally granting him the licences he has been requesting for years to manage the marshes. "We don't want to turn it into a Disneyworld, but into a space open to schools, to organisations and to the development of thousands of projects that will make the marsh a desirable place.