Did you know…?
Once a year in Honduras, it rains fish.
Each year, in the Yoro Department of Honduras, the people celebrate Festival de la Lluvia de Peces—The Festival of the Rain of Fishes. The festival honors a particularly bizarre phenomenon which happens once a year, between May and July—it rains fish.
People who have witnessed the phenomenon say that it starts with a huge, dark cloud in the sky, followed by two to three hours of thunder storms, lightning, and torrential rain. When the storm clears, the ground is covered with hundreds of live fish flopping on the ground, which people take home, cook, and eat. The fish are all the same size—about 6 inches long—and are completely blind. But even stranger than the appearance of the fish is the fact that these particular fish are not found in any of the surrounding bodies of water.
There is no concrete explanation for this phenomenon, but there are theories. The first is that it is meteorological—the fish get sucked up in waterspouts over the Atlantic Ocean, some 140 miles away, and are deposited on the ground in Honduras. Of course, no explanation is made as to how it happens the same time every year. There is also the claim that these are fresh-water fish, which debunks the waterspout theory, but leads some to think that, because they are blind, they come from subterranean rivers. That theory has never been proved, either.
The explanation that most of the people in the area believe is a religious one. Father Jose Manuel Subirana, a nineteenth-century Spanish Catholic missionary, visited Honduras in 1856. On the trip he saw hordes of people so poor they had nothing to eat, so he prayed for three days and three nights, asking God for a miracle of food. The Rain of Fishes has happened ever since.
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