A thousand metres below La Santa lies the red gold: the family fishing the carabineros served to Xi Jinping and the Pope

They leave at four in the morning. Off La Santa, on the north-west coast, the seabed does not slope away: it drops. Within a few miles you go from twenty metres, where you can still make out the stones, to a thousand metres of cold, motionless dark. Down there, where no light reaches and the water sits around ten degrees, one animal grows very slowly — the one that in the past two years has ended up on the table of a Chinese president and of a pope.

Its name is Aristaeopsis edwardsiana. Here they call it the carabinero, and the press gave it another name that has stuck: the red gold of Lanzarote.

Nobody knew they were there

The story begins with a wrong assumption: that off La Santa there were not enough carabineros to make a living from. Everyone took it for granted that these belonged to Huelva, to Cádiz, to the deep Mediterranean.

The Olivero family found otherwise some thirty years ago, and has since built an entire trade on an animal living under their own doorstep that nobody else had seriously looked for. Thirty years to learn what depth it sits at, in which spot, in what weather — and above all how to bring it up without ruining it.

A trap invented for the job

You do not trawl for carabineros: trawling breaks them, and a broken carabinero is worth nothing. The Oliveros designed their own traps, built for that depth and that fragile body. Drop, wait, haul. One at a time.

That is why they come ashore whole, antennae intact, shell still gleaming. The working day starts at 04:00 and ends at 14:00, and on a good day they can bring up sixty kilos. On a bad one they do not go out at all, and that is not a polite formula: here the sea genuinely decides. Anyone ordering knows it and accepts it.

They are fished by one family, with two boats. The owner of the Atlantis Seis is José Manuel Olivero Martín. Nobody else fishes them in these waters.

The dinner for three hundred

On 13 November 2024 Xi Jinping arrived in Gran Canaria. That evening there was an official dinner for three hundred guests at the Hotel Santa Catalina in Las Palmas, five stars, the hotel that important names have been passing through for a century. On the menu, as Atlántico Hoy reported, forty kilos of fish and carabineros. The carabineros were from La Santa, caught that same day.

Then a cookery school rang

In June 2026 the phone went. A cookery school in Gran Canaria: they needed carabineros for the menu of Pope Leo XIV on his visit to the Canaries. At the time of the call they had not yet been told the quantity.

Carlos Olivero's reaction, in La Voz de Lanzarote, is worth more than any slogan: «We did not expect it at all, even though plenty of famous people have tried it. But the Pope tasting the carabinero of La Santa — that you really do not expect».

Before him it had already been eaten by Pedro Sánchez and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. And outside politics: José Andrés, Princess of Asturias laureate and the best-known Spanish cook in the world; Schattenhofer and Gorostiza, two Michelin stars, who worked it with haute-cuisine technique at the Festival de las Cocinas Volcánicas; and an appearance at Madrid Fusión, which for a product is rather like floating on the stock exchange.

What it tastes like

Deep red, almost violet across the back. The head is the part that matters: it is full of a dense, iodised juice that cooks squeeze out and use as a base. The flesh is firm and sweet at once, with a return of the sea that farmed prawns do not come close to.

The right way to cook it is the shortest: a searing plancha, coarse salt, thirty seconds a side. Everything else is noise. Anyone doing it in a pan with garlic is cooking something else.

Beside the carabinero sits the gamba de La Santa, the island's long-standing red prawn: smaller, more delicate, sweet. That one, at most, with garlic — or simply boiled in sea water.

Buying them

They sell direct, with no middlemen, to restaurants and to private customers. Retail prices on Lanzarote are €120 a kilo for carabineros and €100 a kilo for prawns; off the island, price on request. From one kilo up. Collect in La Santa, or they deliver — to a house, a villa or a boat, anywhere on the island.

Two rules that say a good deal about the people on the other end. First: order at least three days ahead, because somebody has to go and get them. Second: you pay on delivery, never in advance. If the sea will not let them out, there is no delivery and there is nothing to refund.

Orders and information at carabineroslasanta.com, by WhatsApp.