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 Denominación de Origen in 1925.

In this episode, Marti Buckley explains how phylloxera in France sent Bordeaux merchants south in the 1860s carrying small barrels and long aging, why traditional Rioja tastes how it does, what crianza, reserva and gran reserva guarantee by law, and how a wave of growers pushing single-vineyard and village wines is rewriting a hundred-year-old system that has only ever measured time in oak.

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

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 who first coiled one point to bakers whose religion prohibited pork, a contradiction that runs through the expulsions and forced conversions of the 1490s. Marti Buckley traces that origin debate, explains the European protection now governing the name, names the three Palma bakeries worth the walk, weighs the filled-versus-plain argument, and lays out how a two-euro breakfast pastry forced Ryanair into a public retreat.

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 www.travelcookeat.com

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 Athletic train children from age seven, the web of more than 21,000 registered clubs and town-hall leagues that feeds them, and the fútbol sala courts credited with forging Spanish ball control.

Learn about the 100,000 dues-paying members that own Barcelona outright. Or why Athletic Club has fielded only Basque players for over a century without ever being relegated. And how a league with no playoff stays tense until the final matchday. Plus the rituals around the game: four daily print sports newspapers, radio marathons on air since 1954, and la quiniela at the tobacco shop.

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

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 with a whole ham at the top that comes first, the seven trucks filled with tomatoes, the rocket at eleven and the rocket at noon that stops everyone at once. Host Marti Buckley gets into where the tomatoes come from, how to participate, and where this fascinating Spanish tradition started (hint...it was a long time ago).

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

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-century monks who collected octopus as tribute, dried stiff for the journey over the hills; through the pulpeiras of Arcos who turned boiling it into a prestige craft passed mother to daughter; and through the Leonese mule drivers who carried the olive oil and pimentón north. She sorts pulpo á feira from pulpo a la gallega, explains why most Spanish octopus now arrives through foreign ports, and lays out how champion pulpeiros cook it, from the freezer to the wooden plate.

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

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 pressurized beer up from nineteenth century bar cellars, to the two contradictory pouring styles that split Spanish bartenders into camps who each insist the other is wrong. Along the way: the job the foam is doing up there, the pre-pour water ritual, the Brussels lace test that proves a pour was done well, a regional dictionary that runs from zurito to cañón to the Madrid liter with a surprising name, and the numbers behind the glass, including the 31 céntimos every caña sends to the public coffers. Everything you need to know about the caña!

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

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 "Spain is different" to the rest of Europe. A rule built for visitors ended up shaping the daily lunch of Spanish workers instead. This episode traces that shift, what a menú costs today by region, and the quality pressures facing this beloved weekday meal now.

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 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? What are the different types? Which ones are the best? This episode traces that history from the medieval migrations that built Castilla's roasting culture, through the Argentine influence behind Basque and Galician grilling, into the very different paths each region took with fire. It closes with the restaurants keeping the tradition alive today, from a 124-year-old asador still in operation to one of the most influential grill kitchens in the world.

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