After a long voyage, Bartolomeu, the 27kg Caretta Caretta turtle, caught off the coast of the Azores Islands, has returned home. His adventure began when he was caught in a Norwegian trawler’s fishing nets and then taken to Atlenterhavsparken Park in Norway.
“We will never know the real reason why they took him, or why they didn’t just return him to the sea,” says Élio Vicent, a Zoomarine marine biologist. However, days after the arrival of the turtle, the Norwegian authorities confiscated it under Scandinavian law, which doesn’t allow parks to keep foreign animals.
Bartolomeu is now in the Algarve and being treated at Zoomarine’s rehabilitation centre for aquatic animals. He will remain there until the end of October, when he will be set free off the Sagres coast. “As soon as he got here, we put some crabs into his tank from the Ria Formosa. He wouldn’t eat for the first couple of days after he arrived, but now he is starting to eat a little. Apart from that, he is in good health,” Vicent explained.
