Casetas and Pinchos de Feria

On september 7th the whole Salamanca celebrated Santa María de la Vega (the Virgen de la Vega, Salamanca's patron as well as San Juan de Sahagún (we talked about in this Spanish post). 

Pinchos de la caseta Café Rúa.

Among all the activities happening during these Salamanca's Ferias y Fiestas, concerts, exhibitions and even more (you can see more in the program, in this pdf or you can get a brochure in the Tourist Office), there is one in particular all of us are waiting for.

One of the activities we love is going for pinchos at the 'casetas'. The whole city smells and offers you a wide variety of tastes. The Feria de Día is one of the greater attraction during Ferias y Fiestas: this year we can taste pinchos de feria and a drink for just 2 euros in the 99 casetas placed in different corners of Salamanca.

Pato en escabeche de naranja y salsa de arándanos,
el pincho de feria del restaurante El Bardo.

If you don't already know where to start your tapas tour, take a look at De Pinchos, a free app for smartphones with maps in which can find the casetas (like the one at the bottom of this post), all the cafés and their pinchos de feria and the rating left by other users. You can download it for free for iOS and Android. All the casetas, with their pinchos and music, will stay open until the 15th of september.

For the first time ever, this year there is a photography contest “Vive la Feria”, held on social media. To participate, you can just add the hashtag #vivelaferia to your pictures in Instagram or Twitter.

Ración de pulpo en la caseta de Galicia
(casetas regionales en el Campo San Francisco).

We also want to recommend you some must-do things: diez cosas que no deberías perderte de las Ferias y Fiestas.

Fajita de codillo confitado con salsa de manzana y miel, el pincho de feria de la caseta The Molly's Cross.

Pinchos and Tapas: the Spanish taste

Spanish people love going to tapear, one of the most common activity in Spain and well known all over the world. Just for few euros you can have tapas or pinchos, little portions served with a caña of beer or a glass of wine.

Their name originated from a curious custom. Tapas are so named because they used to literally plug (spanish: tapar) glasses of beer or wine with a piece of bread and a slice of ham. In this way they avoided that dust or flies dropped in the glasses. While pinchos are so named because they are served thrusted (spanish: pinchados) by a stick and are very common in the north of Spain.

But where can we taste some of these little but precious dishes in Salamanca? Follow this short guide to know 5 places to eat well and save money ;)

Getting started from the centre, you can really eat in Plaza Mayor at Café Real, where you can have the Salamanca typical tapas without spend a fortune.

One of the cheapest place is 100 Montaditos, in Calle Concejo nearby Plaza Mayor. On mondays there is a special offer so that you can have everything you want just for 0,50€.

Tiempo de Vinos, in Calle Doctrinos, a short step from Calle Compañia, deserve you stop off here in order to sip an excellent wine combined with tradicional tapas and jamón serrano, a typical kind of Spanish ham. So good!

Turning a corner in Rúa Mayor you can go to Tapas 2.0, whose name says everything. Here tradition and modernity are combined in a successful way. Maybe less cheap than other places in this list, but you should really try it for the quality of its dishes and their original look. 

Lizarran, in Gran Vía, is known for its unusual style. You just have to take a drink and then get something from a variety of just done tapas and pinchos which waiters bring from the kitchen. Then you pay just depending on how many sticks you collected and their dimensions, so you eat whatever you want with a fixed price.

And if you don't still have enough to eat and want to try something good, the Van Dyck area is what you are looking for.

¡Que aproveche!

Ester - student at Tía Tula