Spain: Mercat de Sant Josep de la Boqueria

I know I've been rather MIA this past week and I apologize for that.  My sister is back for summer vacation and on top of that, CK is visiting from Chicago, so things are pretty crazy around here.  To make up for my absence, I give you a monster post about la Boqueria with lots and lots of pictures!  (I'll try to keep the text to a minimum.)

When I travel, I love to visit markets.  Markets are always so colorful and lively and most importantly, filled with good food.  So when my sister strongly recommended that we check out la Boqueria, I really had no complaints:

La Boqueria is a sprawling maze of fruit stands, cured meat stands, cheese stands, fresh fish stands, candy stands, and whatever other stands you can think of.

We naturally gravitated toward the cured meat stands:

Uh, find me one person (who isn't a vegetarian) who can resist this:

Yea.  I thought not.  We quickly snatched up a cup of proscuitto as our first purchase of the day:

When I spotted this baked goods stand, I dragged T and AF over and refused to budge until we bought something:

Or as it turns out, a lot of somethings.  But how could I resist?  Just look at this selection:

While I was perusing the baked stuff, AF discovered this little sausage and fries cup sitting at the top of the counter:

I immediately picked out this little pocket of goodness:

It was filled with chicken:

We bought this cheese bread out of curiosity:

Both the flavor and the texture were rather intensely cheesy:

Not exactly my cup of tea, but I can see a cheese lover being a huge fan.

Then came this empanada:

Hello porky:

Everything was heated in the microwave, but that didn't bother us at all.  You can't expect everything to be piping hot right out of the oven all the time.

So that we didn't choke on all our bread, we stopped by a juice stand:

There were probably a dozen juice stands at la Boqueria.  Make sure you walk around a bit before deciding on one because some have more juice options than others and some charge 1.50 € while others only 1 €.  We didn't do enough checking around, which is how we ended up spending 1.50 € instead of 1 €.

Oh, well.  The juice was delicious though:

I don't remember the exact flavor combos, but there was definitely a papaya, a mango, and a berry.

After finishing everything we bought, we waded back in to the market for dessert:

There was no way we could just walk past this display:

I picked out a pina colada popsicle:

I don't remember what AF chose, but T went with strawberry and coconut:

My pina colada popsicle was no joke.  I could taste the alcohol immediately.  The alcohol taste was just so...present...that I gave up on finishing the thing.  I'm a wuss like that.

We loved la Boqueria so much that we were back the next morning.  AF made a beeline for this stall:

She wanted the spicy chorizo and she wanted it yesterday:

Meanwhile, I was drawn again to the same baked goods stall.  There were still so many things I wanted to sink my teeth into.  Like this arepa for example:

It came with pork crackling and cheese:

Woo, boy.

Then there was this baby:

It was like the empanada from the day before, but much breadier and filled with chicken:

A little too bready.

I was excited to try another fried pocket:

This time, I went with tuna:

Probably one of my favorites.  Closely tied with the arepa.

As if that wasn't enough, we got this pot pie like thing:

The bread was pretty dense, but the shrimp filling was quite good (though not exactly shrimpy):

As with the day before, we stopped by a juice stand to prevent ourselves from choking on all the bread.  This time, we walked around until we found a stall selling juices for 1 €.  I picked some kind of kiwi blend while T and AF picked the brightest color drinks they could find:

There may have been dragonfruit in that Pepto-Bismol colored one.  Heh.

Love, love, love la Boqueria.  You really can't visit Barcelona without stopping by.  It's the best place for a quick snack or a light meal (or a heavy one if you're so inclined).  And for all you tourists, la Boqueria is the perfect one stop shop for edible souvenirs and it's also great for colorful photo ops.  Plenty to see wherever you turn.

GO.  Really.  You won't regret it.

This ends my monster post.  Hope it made up for my recent neglect of this blog!


Mercat de Sant Josep de la Boqueria
Rambla, 91
08001 Barcelona, Spain
93 412 13 15
http://www.boqueria.info/