Are there any mermaid legends in Cataluña?
Yes, more or less.
The most famous one is actually a merman, called Peix Nicolau (Nicolau Fish).
The legend says that Nicolau used to be a normal human boy from a coastal town, but he loved swimming in the sea more than anything else. He spent all the time he could at the beach, swimming instead of helping at home or working, and his mother often had to go drag him out of the water to bring him back to eat, work, or go to sleep. One day, his mother was frustrated and said "if you’re going to spend all the time in the water, you might as well become a fish!", and that became true from his hips down.
Living on land was difficult for him, because he couldn't walk and he had to be wet at all times. So he decided to go live in the sea, and he still lives there now. He swam the whole sea and this allowed him to invent the nautical charts.
In Mallorca they say that he was warned to never try to swim between Santa Margalida and Artà because it's too dangerous, but he decided to go there nevertheless and died. In Catalonia we don't say he ever died.
Peix Nicolau is the king of waters and everything that lives in water. Sailors used to believe he lives in the beaches, in the part where the waves would keep him in touch with water, but seeing him would be a sign of misfortune. It's of vital importance for sailors and fishermen to never see him, and most importantly to never fish him.
Others say that he lives in a palace underwater. Every March, he leaves his palace to find out the news. He takes a walk and, once he’s seen everything he wanted to see, he goes back to his palace until next year.
This legend is found in the Catalan countries but also in Naples and Sicily, and is recorded since the 12th century.
Women mermaids exist too in legends. In Catalan, they are called sirenes. They appear in written texts as your typical mermaid/siren, half woman half fish or half woman half bird. Take for example this extract from a Medieval Catalan bestiary book:
Mermaids are a marvellous creature, there are three kinds: one is half fish and half woman, another is half bird and half woman, and the other is half horse and half woman. The one that is made half fish and half woman has such a sweet voice that everyone who hears her sing goes near her to hear her and they find her voice so pleasant that they fall asleep; when the mermaid sees that the man is asleep, she sees him as useless and kills him. That one that is half bird and half woman plays the harp in such a sweet way that everyone is pleased to go hear her, so much that they fall asleep; and again this mermaid wants to kill him. And the one that is half horse half woman, plays the trumpet in such a sweet way that everyone is pleased to go hear her; and since the man is asleep for the sweetness of the trumpet, said mermaid also kills him.
The horse-mermaids have disappeared nowadays, at least they’re not part of the concept “sirena” anymore. But we still have some legends about the sirenes that are half bird half women, for example la serena dels Ports. This is a legend from the Terra Alta area that talks of a girl who was fooled by the boy she loved and thus she was damned to become a siren. She had long red hair, a peak instead of mouth, and she fed from the livestock owned by the shepherds of the area. On full moon nights, she went out looking for company, but she always scared everyone. Tired of scaring people away and being lonely, she left. She travelled to find a cure to her curse until she reached the Ports area. She hadn’t found a cure, but she was very comfortable there. In the Ports, she didn’t feel like an evil beast, but one member more of the local bird community, so she never felt lonely again.
But the oral tradition, until relatively recently, often didn’t necessarily see mermaids as half fish. Very often they were basically water-women/encantades (a kind of fae women who live for centuries and whose beauty can capture men to their perdition) but from the sea instead of fresh sweet water, which is were the encantades live. These don’t have a fish tail, they just look like beautiful women who are always young. In fact, some legends talk about them dancing, which I don’t think they would be able to do if they didn’t have legs.
I wouldn’t dare to say there wasn’t any mermaid who was half fish in the oral tradition, and as we’ve seen this mythological creature was always known for by the people who could read and write, and probably the sailors who interacted with sailors from other cultures. But since the 20th century, the idea of what a sirena/mermaid is has shifted because of foreign influence, so now we imagine them always to have a fish tail, including many ones that originally didn’t have that trait.
I’ll translate to English an excerpt from Costumari Català by Joan Amades, one of the most famous books about Catalan traditions.
Mermaids, queens of the sea, ladies of the fish, leave their palaces at the bottom of the sea, where they spend the winter months. They stroll at the water’s surface with their shiny hair laid out, and while they swim they don’t stop singing and playing guitarrins [similar to ukeleles] with a sound as sweet as their voices, to enchant the sailors. Whoever hears them becomes seduced and follows them to their palaces, where they remain under a spell forever.
In the area of Costa Brava and l’Estartit, it’s believed that on the Night of Sant Joan [June 23rd] mermaids go to Begur to count the grains of sand. The queen of mermaids lives in an enchanted palace made of glass, whose entrance is through a cave all made of pink coral, very deep underwater in the Medes islets. People from the Cap de Creus believed that, around October, a mermaid different from most of her species wakes up. What makes her different is that she’s maybe more beautiful and has a singing voice that’s incomparably more harmonious and honey-like, which can only be heard by fishermen and sailors, because she sings only for them.
There are other local legends about them. I’ll explain one more, that talks about the creation of l’Empordà peninsula. On a full moon night, the mermaids were dancing in the beach of Pals. That day, the queen of mermaids had left her palace in the Medes isles and was dancing too, in the most beautiful way imaginable. Some fishermen were watching them, but they knew that they couldn’t get closer to them or the mermaids would leave. A shepherd from the Pyrenees mountains happened to be there too, but he didn’t know he couldn’t get closer, and so he did. The queen of mermaids and him fell in love, but he had to go back to the Pyrenees. Apart, they couldn’t stop thinking of each other. So, on a full moon night, the shepherd took some steps towards the sea and the queen of mermaids took some steps towards the mountains, and where they found each other they created l’Empordà.
