Spain Explained

Turrón is Spain's Christmas candy: toasted almonds and honey, cooked down and pressed into a bar, then cut into small pieces and left on a tray for snacking throughout the Christmas season. It's holiday season here at Spain Explained, and we're kicking it off by breaking down the two classics, the hard turrón de Alicante and the soft turrón de Jijona.  Tune in to listen about how one small town ab...

Horchata is one of Spain's most famous non-alcoholic drinks: a cold, milky beverage made from chufa, a small brown tuber that grows underground in the sandy huerta just north of Valencia. Every glass carrying the Chufa de Valencia seal comes from 339 hectares worked by 240 farmers. In this episode, we go deep (as always), tracing the word back to a Latin barley drink and follows the chufa from spr...

Every November 1, Spain marks Día de Todos los Santos, the All Saints' Day holiday when families fill the cemeteries to scrub their relatives' markers and leave chrysanthemums, and when pastry shop windows fill with little marzipan bones called huesos de santo. Marti Buckley explains where the feast came from and why November 1 and November 2 are two separate days but in Spain are folded into one....

Cava is Spain's sparkling wine and one of the great bargains in the wine world. It's made the same way as Champagne, with a second fermentation inside the bottle. It's also the most exported wine in Spain: 190 million bottles last year, to more than 130 countries. Marti Buckley explains how the bubbles get into the bottle, why the word cava (which means cellar) replaced the old name xampany, and h...

La propina is the Spanish tip: a few voluntary coins left on a saucer, on top of a wage the waiter already earns by contract. Marti Buckley explains how much to leave at the bar and at a restaurant table, and why ten percent is the absolute ceiling. The word comes from a Greek toast meaning "I drink before you," and the first propina was the wine left in the cup. The history runs through Madrid in...

Spain Explained continues its series on all of Spain's autonomous communities with the Comunitat Valenciana (Comunidad Valenciana in Spanish, the Valencian Community in English), the birthplace of paella and Spain's sunny citrus-filled paradise. And it's out just in time  for October 9, the Día de la Comunitat Valenciana, and makes a good way to celebrate the day. Marti Buckley starts with the map...

A pintxo is a small bite of food, two or three mouthfuls, eaten standing at a bar in the Basque Country with a drink in your hand and someone to talk to. It started a hundred years ago in San Sebastián as something to line the stomach between rounds of wine, a hard-boiled egg or an anchovy on a toothpick, and it grew into miniature haute cuisine, with its own competitions, its own culture and, sin...

Iberia is everywhere in Spain: the airline, the ham, the lynx, the wolf, the peninsula itself. So what is it? Iberia is the piece of land in the far southwest of Europe that Spain sits on. Spain covers most of it, Portugal covers most of the rest, and Andorra, Gibraltar, and a sliver of France take up the remainder. Iberia has never been a country. It's a geographic name, and it's older than Spain...

In certain parts of Spain, a group of friends settles up before the night starts. Everyone puts the same amount of cash into one pile, usually ten euros a head. One person holds it and pays at every bar. Eight people can move through six bars over an evening and never once discuss who owes what. In the Basque Country, that pile is called the bote, and it runs on some very real rules. Marti Buckley...

Spain Explained is taking on all seventeen of Spain's regions, one episode at a time, starting with Catalunya, the region people hear about most and get explained the least. September 11 is the Diada, the national day of Catalunya, so this is the episode to celebrate it with. Everything you wanted to know about Catalunya (Cataluña in Spanish, Catalonia in English): the northeastern corner of Spain...

A tertulia has no members, no minutes and no closing time, and historically it has been powerful enough to pressure kings to ratify constitutions. The word in its traditional, historical sense means a standing appointment to debate: the same people, at the same café table, at the same hour, on one shared subject, week after week for years. Marti Buckley explains where the term comes from, which ru...

Spain's constitution, the one the country still runs on, never names a single one of its 17 comunidades autónomas. Not Cataluña, not Andalucía, none of them. These are basically Spain's equivalent of states, and when Spaniards voted on the text in December 1978, today's map did not exist yet. So where did they come from?  In this episode of Spain Explained, Marti Buckley dissects how a country tha...

Sell a bottle of Gran Reserva Rioja before its fifth birthday and the region will fine you. Rioja is a wine denomination in northern Spain, strung along the Ebro across some 65,000 hectares of La Rioja, Basque Álava and a corner of Navarra, overwhelmingly red, overwhelmingly Tempranillo, and built around a legal promise that somebody already did the aging for you. It became Spain's first Denominac...

Not every pastry has its own aviation policy. The ensaimada is a coiled Mallorcan spiral, its pork lard dough stretched nearly transparent, baked and buried under powdered sugar, and the Balearic government once calculated that around forty of them fly out on every plane bound for the mainland. The earliest written record sits in a Palma convent ledger from 1642, though both leading theories about...

Spain won the 2026 World Cup while conceding just one goal across the entire tournament, a first for any champion, with a squad that included (for the first time ever) zero Real Madrid players. So let's talk fútbol! Football. Soccer. In Spain, it's big. In this episode, Spain Explained talks about the machinery behind that win: the canteras, literally quarries, where clubs like Barcelona and Athle...

On the last Wednesday of August, in a small town in Valencia, 20,000 people have a gigantic food fight of somewhere around 150 tonnes of overripe tomatoes. That is La Tomatina, held in Buñol near Valencia and certified by Guinness as the largest annual food fight in the world. What the ...why do they do this? Listen to this episode to find out everything about this famous fiesta: the soaped pole w...

The town most associated with octopus in all of Spain sits 90 kilometers from the nearest coastline, with no port and no boats, yet every August it serves around 33 tons of it in a single day. That inland paradox is the key to the whole story. In this episode, Marti Buckley traces how pulpo became the signature dish of Galicia, and why it happened inland instead of on the coast: through twelfth-ce...

Drinking beer is one of Spain's national pastimes. A caña, the smallish draft beer in Spain, is its protagonist…but beware of regional differences. In Madrid, a caña is 200 milliliters of draft beer. Order one in Bilbao and the glass holds nearly twice that. Same word, same tap, different drink. In this episode, Marti Buckley traces the caña from its name, borrowed from the metal pipe that carried...

Four million people sit down across Spain every weekday for the menú del día. A fixed price, a first course, a second, bread, wine, dessert. The menú del día is such a Spanish institution, it feels like it must have always existed. In this episode, find the fascinating story of how it actually came out of a 1964 government decree written for foreign tourists, under a dictatorship trying to sell "S...

A restaurant in Segovia has spent nearly a century proving the tenderness of its roast suckling pig by carving it with the edge of a plate instead of a knife. That gesture made the dish famous, and it is just one piece of a much older story: the Spanish asador, the institution that turned roasting meat and fish over fire into one of the country's defining culinary traditions. So what is an asador?...

This episode is devoted to a single, four-letter word that you'll hear a LOT in Spain: vale. What does it mean, when is it used, and why is the answer … just about all the time for anything? This episode traces the full arc of vale, from its Latin roots meaning "be well," through its centuries as a formal Spanish farewell, and into its modern role as the Spanish equivalent of "okay."  Along the wa...

Forget sangria...tinto de verano is Spain's true summer drink.  In this episode, we break down tinto de verano : what it actually is, the correct ratio of ice and the mixer ,  where it came from, and why it's THE drink. Literally "summer red wine." And it does exactly what it says. Red wine, carbonated mixer, a lot of ice, and usually a slice of lemon. That's the whole thing.  We go into the origi...

Chorizo shows up everywhere in Spain: sliced on a cutting board, tucked into a bocadillo, cooking down in a pot of lentils, skewered at a bar. It belongs to no single meal or occasion. It's daily, constant, and deeply woven into Spanish food culture. This episode covers everything you wanted to know about chorizo, hopefully ever! What chorizo is and how it's made, why fresh, cured, and smoked vari...

Manchego is Spain's most exported cheese ... and its most copied. Nearly 60 percent of all Spanish DOP cheese sold abroad carries that name, which makes the imitation market significant and the label worth reading carefully. This episode covers the cheese from the ground up: what the DOP designation actually requires, the Manchega breed and why their low milk yield is baked into every price tag, t...

In Spain, when a public holiday falls on a Thursday or Tuesday, taking the working day in between as leave turns it into a four-day weekend. The country plans around this. The calendar gets studied. There is a specific word for it: puente, a bridge, because you are bridging the gap between the festivo and the weekend. This episode covers how the puente works, what technically qualifies as one vers...