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 1933, when waiters won the abolition of the tip, spent months handing coins back to customers, and then went on strike for a real salary. There's also the cash question, which directly affects HOW you should leave the tip: 97 percent of Spaniards usually tip in cash. The episode also goes into the current feeling around the tip: an August 2026 survey, 77 percent said they would eliminate the propina altogether.

If you want more about Spain: ∙ Subscribe to Marti's Substack at https://substack.com/@martibuckley ∙ Follow her on Instagram @martibuckley ∙ Visit her blog at travelcookeat.com

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: three provinces stacked along 500 kilometers of Mediterranean coast. From there she explains region's history, the Valencian language and where it is spoken, the October 2024 flood, and what the rest of Spain pictures when it pictures Valencia. Then, of course, the food: the sanctioned ingredients of a paella valenciana, horchata with fartons, the mid-morning esmorzaret, and the marzipan Valencians give the people they love every October 9.

If you want more about Spain: ∙ Subscribe to Marti's Substack at https://substack.com/@martibuckley ∙ Follow her on Instagram @martibuckley ∙ Visit her blog at travelcookeat.com

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, since 2019, its own institute to defend it.

Marti Buckley, author of The Book of Pintxos, explains how a pintxo differs from a tapa, follows the story from the bulk wine shops of the 1920s to the chalkboard at La Cuchara de San Telmo in 1999 that turned the pintxo into a meal, talks about the different types of pintxos, walks through the etiquette on how to eat pintxos, and explains the entire, delicious tradition.

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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, older than Portugal, and older than the Romans.

Greek sailors coined it around 2,600 years ago after a river they called the Iberus, which we know today as the Ebro. In this episode Marti Buckley explains where the name comes from, why the Romans replaced it with Hispania (the word that became España), who the original Iberians were, and why their language can be read aloud but still can't be translated. She also explains why Portugal is Iberian, why the ham and the lynx carry the name, and whether anyone in Spain thinks of themselves as Iberian.

If you want more about Spain: ∙ Subscribe to Marti's Substack at https://substack.com/@martibuckley ∙ Follow her on Instagram @martibuckley ∙ Visit her blog at travelcookeat.com

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 explains where the word comes from. She covers how the system runs stop by stop, how not to be the person who wrecks it, what Bilbao does with the coins left at the bottom, which involves a slot in a wall in the Casco Viejo, and the version of bote you'll find in other parts of Spain, like Granada, Galicia, Pamplona and Madrid.

If you want more about Spain: ∙ Subscribe to Marti's Substack at https://substack.com/@martibuckley ∙ Follow her on Instagram @martibuckley ∙ Visit her blog at travelcookeat.com

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: four provinces, around eight million people, a territory a little bigger than Belgium, three official languages, and a fifth of the Spanish economy. Barcelona gets the attention, but only one Catalan in five lives there.

Marti Buckley lays out the map, explains why the national day commemorates a defeat in 1714, and runs the political calendar from the 1979 Statute to the May 2024 elections.. Then the languages, from Catalan's ten million speakers to the few thousand who speak Aranese in the Val d'Aran, the human towers of Valls, the log that children beat at Christmas, and the food: pa amb tomàquet, chicken with prawns, La Boquería, and the Reus vermouth powerhouse behind a Sunday ritual all of Spain now claims.

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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 runs back to a Roman-era theologian and a row of theater seats, and what separates a tertulia from the French salon and the Italian academy. She covers the Madrid cafés that incubated both the Second Republic and the Spanish avant-garde, the three poets who founded Versos con Faldas in 1951, and how tertulianos became the panelists who set the daily mood of Spanish public life.

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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 that ran on 49/50 provinces for nearly a century and a half ended up with 17 regional governments that control hospitals, schools, language policy, and in three cases their own police forces. She covers the 1833 province grid the whole system was built from, the fast track that Cataluña, the Basque Country, and Galicia took because they had voted on self-government during the Second Republic, the Andalucían referendum that broke the two-tier model open, and the fiscal arrangement that lets the Basque Country and Navarra collect their own taxes and pay Madrid a negotiated sum. It is the foundation for a year of regional episodes to come.

If you want more about Spain: ∙ Subscribe to Marti's Substack at https://substack.com/@martibuckley ∙ Follow her on Instagram @martibuckley ∙ Visit her blog at travelcookeat.com