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Although there are some essential features that identify and define it beyond its recipes, Spanish gastronomy is an amalgam, a melting pot of cuisines with a markedly distinctive character; born and shaped by its geography, resources, history, and the particular customs and tastes of its inhabitants

Thus, in the north we find a fishing and mountain cuisine, where the fruit of the Cantabrian Sea is treated without artifice and where bovine meats give account of the freshness and lushness of the meadows they graze

On the main land’s interior we find on the one hand a farm cookery, built around the water resources that settlements along riverbanks provide; another more robust tableland cooking style, where the pigwhich is said to be used up to its gaitreigns supreme without detriment to game meats and pulses; and finally a shepherdstyled cuisine, where in every preparation and bite you can still taste and feel the imprint of the transhumance routes of old

In the south, Mediterranean cooking, also typical of the Balearic and Levantine peninsular coasts

And in the African Atlantic there is the cuisine of the Canary Islands, of mestizo and humble heritage

If Julio Iglesias once famously said that the country smelled of garlic, in an interview to the media upon his return to Spain, the truth is that for the visitor who intends to delve into the roots of its gastronomic offerings, far more pleasant surprises await For even though the common denominator of these traditional cuisines is the exaltation of the product, treated in a plain and honest way with rather simple seasonings, fortunately it is still possible to

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