‘It’s Just Soap’: Marsascala’s Viral Sea Slime Sparks Fish-Farm Feud

**‘Slime’ off Marsascala coast is foam, fish farm industry says**

MARSASCALA – Early risers on the south-eastern promenade got more than their usual dose of sea breeze last weekend when a viscous, khaki-coloured film began creeping onto the rocky shoreline between St Thomas Bay and Żonqor Point. Videos of children poking the mystery goo with snorkels quickly migrated from TikTok to the national broadcaster, prompting the same question from Sliema hairdressers to Gozitan fishermen: “What on earth is sliming Marsascala?”

On Tuesday the Aquaculture Directorate delivered its answer: harmless protein foam released during routine net-cleaning at the tuna pens two kilometres offshore. “The substance is 93% seawater, 6% organic fish-food residue, and less than 1% biodegradable soap,” director Andreina Fleri Soler told a press conference held on the very slipway where volunteers had spent Sunday scooping buckets of the stuff into rubbish bags. “It looks ugly, but it is the marine equivalent of the lather you get when washing a plate of fenkata.”

Locals are not convinced. “My nanna has swum here every morning since 1958 and she says the sea has never felt so slippery,” 24-year-old paddle-board coach Davide Sant said. “If it’s just soap, why did my cousin wake up with a rash that looks like imqarrun il-forn?” By Monday evening the Facebook group “Marsascala Residents & Friends” had clocked 1,800 comments, including photos of dead bogue floating belly-up beside ice-cream wrappers. Someone super-imposed a Jaws-style poster reading “SLIME 2024—This time it’s personal”.

The timing could hardly be worse. Marsascala—once dismissed as the “forgotten fishing village” between the yacht marinas of Marsa and the nightlife of St Julian’s—has spent the past five years rebranding itself as Malta’s next eco-tourism gem. The parish church just received EU funds to restore the 18th-century altarpiece; boutique B&Bs have replaced derelict boat houses; and the local council’s summer programme boasts nightly kayak tours that promise “bioluminescence without the Blue Lagoon crowds”. A biodegradable blob is not the kind of blue-flag marketing anyone had in mind.

Mayor Mario Calleja, who also happens to own the seaside kiosk that invented the viral “ftira burger”, is walking a political tightrope. On one side are the fish-farm operators—major employers in a village where the last tuna cannery closed in 1999. On the other are the new wave of remote workers who bought crumbling townhouses during the pandemic and now drive up property prices by 20% a year. “We support sustainable aquaculture,” Calleja told Hot Malta, “but our grandparents didn’t survive world wars to watch their grandchildren swim in fish-washing-up liquid.” He has called for an independent water-quality test and floated the idea of a “slime levy” on feed companies to finance coastal clean-ups.

Environmental NGOs argue the episode exposes a regulatory blind spot. “Malta has no maximum limit on foam discharge, only vague guidelines on ‘visible opacity’,” said Tricia Mizzi from Friends of the Earth. “Meanwhile, the government has licensed a further 80 hectares of offshore cages by 2027 to meet Asian tuna demand.” The lobby group is organising a “Swim-In Protest” this Saturday, inviting bathers to link inflatable doughnuts at the exact coordinates of the pens.

Back on the promenade, 71-year-old pensioner Joe “il-Bosk” Farrugia remembers when fishermen rowed out on paint-peeled luzzus and the only foam came from waves hitting the rocks. “We used to joke that the sea was so clean you could rinse your dentures in it,” he laughed, sipping a Kinnie while watching a council tractor hose down the last traces of slime. “Now we need a press conference to tell us soap is soap.”

Whether the goo is truly benign or the canary in a coal-blue mine, one thing is certain: Marsascala has tasted the bitter-sweet reality of 21st-century Malta—where tradition, tourism and tuna dollars share the same shrinking patch of sea. Until the next slick surfaces, locals will keep scanning the horizon, hoping the only thing that glimmers is the sunrise.