“I still don’t know where the siphon bottles for the vermut are,” says an employee of Marina, a small bar in the newly renovated Mercat de Sant Antoni. It’s clear as we’re walking around that the staff of the market’s few bars and its many vendors are still settling in and adapting to their brand new spots. At the same time, hundreds of visitors have been exploring the revamped market each day since its opening last week asking, “Where can we eat or drink something?” So far, that seems to be the question on everyone’s mind, particularly locals. But this is not another food hall, this is a proper neighborhood market focused on selling quality fresh produce and other food product

La Boquería is undoubtedly one of the most famous markets in the world, but there are 43 markets spread across Barcelona, each with its own unique charms. Once a year, they can be experienced all at the same time, in the same place. From October 17 to 19, 265,000 visitors thronged the square in front of Barcelona Cathedral for the fifth edition of the Mercat de Mercats (Market of Markets) festival, which gathered 40 stalls, 30 local artisan producers, 40 chefs with 17 Michelin stars between them and 14 of the city’s best restaurants. The festival offers an amazing opportunity for locals and tourists to taste the dazzling array of Catalan flavors and to get to know the city’s neighborhood markets.

Upon the hot and dry plains of Les Garrigues, two irrigation canals cut through an agricultural expanse, diverging first from the ample Segre River, which runs through the center of the city of Lleida, before subdividing again, their meandering channels reaching farther and farther into an otherwise parched plateau. These life-giving tributaries are collectively known as the Canal d’Urgell. Les Garrigues, a region of the Catalan province of Lleida, is a fertile green splotch on an otherwise arid landscape 150 kilometers inland from Barcelona. The irrigation of this region, first conceptualized by the Moors in the 13th century but carried out on a grand scale in the late 1700s, has enabled the cultivation and nurturing of farmland, where a crop of prized arbequina olives and fragrant almond trees now stretches toward the horizon.