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The Rain of Fish

Toro, Honduras, is a city of about 100,000 people, situated about a four hour drive from the country’s capital city of Tegucigalpa. (Here’s a map.) If you’re there today, pack sunscreen and lots of water — according to Accuweather, the forecast calls for “intervals of clouds and sunshine [with] a possible danger of dehydration and heatstroke while doing strenuous activities,” with a high temperature of 93 degrees Fahrenheit. If you’re going to be there through the weekend, you may want to pack yourself an umbrella — starting on Friday and continuing into the weekend, there are showers in the forecast.

Oh, and you also may want to bring a fishing net. Because there’s an off chance that some fish may fall from the sky.

Well, maybe — we know for sure that fish appear in the street a few times each year. As the New York Times describes, “it happens every year [for more than a century] — at least once and often more, residents say — during the late spring and early summer. And only under specific conditions: a torrential downpour, thunder and lightning, conditions so intense that nobody dares to go outside. Once the storm clears, the villagers grab buckets and baskets and head down the road to a sunken pasture where the ground will be covered in hundreds of small, silver-colored fish.”

How the fish get there is a mystery, but locals swear that the fish come pouring down with the rain. There’s a video of very questionable provenance showing what appears to be the fish raining down, below, and according to Atlas Obscura, “in the 1970s, a National Geographic team actually witnessed the event, making it one of the few credible sightings of such a phenomenon, though proof that the fish were coming from the sky and not another source remained elusive.” The people of Yoro have named the phenomenon “Lluvia de peces,” which translates to “the rain of fish.”

But the phenomenon lacks an agreed-upon scientific explanation, in part because there’s still a question of how the fish actually end up in the street. Some scientific observers think that the fish normally reside in some sort of underground stream, and when the large rains come, those streams flood, bringing the fish into the street. (The train station by my house is near a river, and on particularly rainy days, some small fish wash up in the walkway to the platforms.) But that, of course, does not involve fish falling from the sky. Another explanation — waterspouts — would account for that factor. Atlas Obscura explains:

But as the Times notes, “In that way, fish would indeed fall from the sky, but the hypothesis does not explain how the spouts score direct hits on the same patches of turf year after year.”

Regardless, for the people of the areas surrounding Toro, the lluvia de peces is a gift. The area, and particularly the rural parts, are poor — per the Times, “poverty is universal, jobs are scarce, large families are crammed into mud-brick homes and meals often are constituted of little more than the subsistence crops residents grow — mainly corn and beans.” The rain of fish brings variety to their diets and, more recently, a new income stream to their bank accounts. As Fast Company reported in 2023, a multinational fish company called Regal Springs teamed up with ad agency Ogilvy to create a product and ad campaign to help the people of Yoro sell their gifted seafood. Locals gather the fish and sell them throughout Honduras as sardines or as marinated fish fillets (neither of which need refrigeration) under the brand “Heaven Fish.” The Ogilvy case study video summarizing the effort, available here, notes that “it’s possible for the people of Yoro to increase their daily wage by 400%” — provided the rain of fish continues.

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More About Raining Stuff Other Than Rain

Today’s Bonus fact: The 2009 movie “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” was a box office smash, bringing in nearly a quarter of a billion dollars at the box office globally. But “meatballs” aren’t a common food in all places, so some versions replace the meatballs with other foods. For example, in some Spanish-speaking countries, the movie is called “Lluvia de hamburguesas” — “hamburger rain” — as seen here. In Hebrew, the movie became plant-based: it is “גשם של פלאפל” — “geshem shel falafel” or “rain of falafel” — with no changes to the meatball artwork).

From the Archives: The Day it Accidentally Rained Whale Blubber: This one, we understand the science behind.

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And thanks! — Dan