L'Escala, Spain - Paella, Serrano ham, Manchego cheese and wine from the Rioja region- countless tourists in Spain have fallen in love with Iberian cuisine and for those who want to enjoy this simple and unpretentious fare to the full there is an easy upgrade. A visit to one of Spain's numerous "fiestas gastronomicas" or food fairs appeals to both the eye and the appetite, and such events offer a deeper insight into local people and their rich culinary heritage.
Take anchovies for instance. They taste best on toasted tomato bread, explains Conchita Sureda. The 55-year-old hails from L'Escala, a fishing village on the Costa Brava with a fine reputation among gourmets. The best anchovies in the land reportedly come from here.
Today Conchita is preparing the tiny silver fish, which are often mistaken for sardines, in an original way. She is up against stiff competition, pitting her cooking skills against 24 other women at the annual anchovy festival held in L'Escala each September.
People flock from all over Spain to sample the specialities created here. Conchita is working flat out to get her meal ready on time. She chops the leeks and mushrooms expertly before frying them in olive oil. In go 12 tender filets of anchovy which are then garnered with a dressing of cream and pepper. "Just pop that lot in the oven and there you have it- roasted anchovies," she says, smiling.
A table is piled high with plates. There are anchovy salads, anchovy-filled vol-au-vents and even anchovies as cookies or in chocolate pudding. While members of the jury mull over who to reward for this year's best anchovy dish, the village is crowded out with hundreds of visitors standing in line at booths to sample delicious anchovies on toasted tomato bread washed down with mouthfuls of red wine.
Those who like their food a little less salty and even brighter may find whatthey are looking for further south along the Mediterranean coast in the Valencian agricultural town of Sueca.
An alluring aroma of stewed rabbit, beans, rice and tomatoes fills the air here as Jose Jimenez carefully slips the meat into a large, circular flat pan coated with hot olive oil. The spitting and splattering prompts a few onlookers to jump back a few steps but there is no causefor alarm. The chef from Valencia knows what he is doing. He adds a few garrofon butter beans and has soon stirred up a perfect paella.
Painstaking attention to detail is not for nothing since everything has to be just right at the prestigious international paella festival where for two weeks in September competition among the paella-makers is fierce. Most of the contestants come from Spain but there are Japanese, Ecuadorian and even German contenders here 30 kilometres south of Valencia. Local worthies judge the paella creations, awarding points for colour, taste and soccarat, the light-brown, crispy crust at the bottom of the pan which experts regard as the essence of a fine paella.
In Sueca the only dish in town is the traditional Paella Valencia which must consist of chicken or rabbit meat, tavella, garrfon beans, tomatoes, snails and last but not least, the juicy Bomba rice which is the heart and soul of any decent Valencian paella. Even the herbal ingredients are prescribed. Enrique Servan from the Pata Negra restaurant in Berlin is sprinkling a tangy mixture of paprika powder, saffron and salt into the huge frying pan. The audience watches his every move, commenting on what is an amateur outdoor spectator sport around these parts. Needless to say everyone here is a paella expert.
Around 100 years ago paella was considered a poor man's dish yet today it is one of Spain's culinary highlights and wherever Valencians choose to party the steaming pans of paella are never far away.
The saffron festival at Consuegra meanwhile is a celebration of all things manchego, that is from the Castilla de Mancha region of Spain. This sleepy place on the plain comes alive at the end of October. With a chain of hills dotted with windmills as a backdrop everything revolves around the purple saffron flower which lends its vibrant canary-hue to the traditional paella. The crocus flowers bloom for only three weeks a year and the villagers troop to the fields before dawn to harvest their precious petals.
Separating the saffron spice from the flowers calls for nimble fingers and local women enjoy competing with each other. Meanwhile the pans are sizzling for the visitors with tasty paella and other local specialities on the menu. Until well into the 1990s this part of Spain was one of the world's chief sources of saffron and the plant still flourishes in the fertile Mancha soil. Around 200 saffron flowers must be plucked to produce just one gramme of the world's =most expensive spice which costs up to 1,400 euros (1,880 dollars) a kilo.
Aficianados of Spanish wine are well catered for by the wine festival at Lognrono in the Rioja region. The fun starts here every year on September 21 at the event to coincide with the Feast Day of St Matthew. The ceremony opens with two men in traditional costumes stomping the freshly-picked grapes in a wooden barrel to commemorate the first grape juice.
White wine enthusiasts might prefer to journey instead to the Albarino festival held in Camrados in Galicia at the beginning of August. In the extreme north-west corner of Spain there are plenty of culinary bashes to choose from, starting with the lamb and mussel festival at Morana in late July through to the octopus festival at Carballino in mid August and the seafood celebrations in O Grove which get underway in mid-October.
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