From Zamora’s Mercado de Abastos and Zaragoza’s Mercado Central to Bilbao’s Mercado de la Ribera, covered food markets offer inspiration and ingredients to home cooks as well as chefs. The individually owned stalls offer the cured sausages and diverse cheeses, pulses, profusion of seasonal produce, mind-boggling seafood, fresh poultry and game, and innards and extremities that make Spain’s cuisine so spectacular.
Many of the country’s markets have open-air roots, and can trace their origins far back, to medieval times or even the Roman era. These ancient plaza-mercados eventually gained solid foundations and roofs with the advances in steel construction in the mid-nineteenth century. Market designs at that time often included the elegant, free-flowing curves of art nouveau, rich in ornamentation and lavished with decorative elements.
In Barcelona, La Boqueria is the city’s most famous market and an icon for the food-conscious city. But it is just one of thirty-nine municipal food markets (and four specialist ones) scattered through Barcelona’s neighborhoods. (It is the largest such network in Europe.) There are other markets closer to my home, though I go to La Boqueria for a handful of specific items brought in from the countryside—foraged wild mushrooms from Llorenç Petràs’s stall, fresh thyme and rosemary from the vegetable stall behind it, the finest Arbequina olives from Olivas y Conservas Pinyol, and particular Galician seafood like large turbot, octopus, percebes (gooseneck barnacles), and navajas (razor clams).
Spain’s markets are not only places to shop but also to eat. Tucked among the stalls, tiny and usually deceptively simple cafés serve splendid cocina de mercado (market cooking). Drawing on the fresh products that surround them in the market, they showcase bold flavors with straightforward cooking techniques.
Standing in a market like Valencia’s Mercado Central, with its soaring, airy, mosaic-covered cupola above and splendid stalls of food all around, it truly feels like being in a cathedral of a faith that celebrates itself through its cuisine.