Tourists Don’t Miss your Culinary Visit!

Anyone who has visited Spain’s sprawling coastal Mediterranean resorts and returned home with the impression that Spaniards only cook paella and chicken in garlic will have missed their visit! They would have missed the vast diversity of dishes eaten every day. Although home cooking might appear at first sight unadorned and straightforward, meals are centered on quality ingredients and seasonal freshness.

Hospitality and generosity also influence the Spanish appreciation of well-prepared food. Spain’s position on the Iberian Peninsula also gives it an Atlantic coastline. This simple geographic fact, along with the country’s massive size, makes it challenging to summarize Spanish cooking. The center of the country is a vast plateau with arid plains, fringed by the landscape that includes Mediterranean and Atlantic coastlines and soaring mountains ranges. The entire country can experience extreme weather conditions ranging from cooking hot to fiercely cold. What someone from sunny Seville considers to be a “typical” meal is unlikely to be described as “typical” by a native of Pamplona.

Most Spanish food is robust and flavorsome, but the north-south culinary divide is easily recognizable. Northern cooking tends to be richer than that of the south and features more meat and dairy products.

One of the most pleasurable aspects of any visit to Spain is sampling the fantastic variety of tapas served in every village, town, or city. The preparation, eating, and enjoyment of tapas is a uniquely Spanish experience. Italians have antipasti, the French enjoy hors d’oeuvres, and the Greeks mezze, but no other culture has anything like tapas.