Food delights in La Boqueria (Mercat Sant Josep) in Barcelona

From The Independent: ‘Goose barnacles, a bull's tail, and a bag of apples, please: the way to the heart of a city is through its food markets. That's why tourists flock to them. 'Independent on Sunday' restaurant critic, Terry Durack, chooses five of his favourites’ | “A city without some sort of fresh-food market at its heart is a dead city. Yet for the past 50 years, the great inner-city markets of the world have struggled for survival against rising rents and the supermarket culture of convenience at all cost. Even Paris faltered when the market was ripped from Les Halles in 1971 and forced to move to the suburb of Rungis.

A city without some sort of fresh-food market at its heart is a dead city. Yet for the past 50 years, the great inner-city markets of the world have struggled for survival against rising rents and the supermarket culture of convenience at all cost. Even Paris faltered when the market was ripped from Les Halles in 1971 and forced to move to the suburb of Rungis.

This makes the living, breathing, daily markets that remain all the more precious. Fortunately, many have become tourist attractions in their own rights, thus guaranteeing their (slightly distorted) survival.

For the visitor, a market is an on-the-spot lesson in how people trade, relate, converse, and exchange. Besides, how else can you find out what's in season, and what you should be ordering for lunch later that day?

Slapping a preservation order on the markets of the world is tempting, but could result in some expensive fruit, vegetable, fish, and meat museums. It's the locals who know how best to keep their markets going and preserve their way of life: by visiting them and using them, as often as possible.

La Boqueria, Barcelona: Open 8am-8.30pm Monday-Saturday

Some tourists make a bee-line for Gaudi's mighty Sagrada Familia the minute they touch down in Barcelona; others head for the hills to the Fundacio Joan Miro art gallery. But intelligent, cultured people, like myself, find more fulfilment at the most vibrant, exciting and dynamic market in the world.

La Boqueria, officially known as Mercat Sant Josep, occupies 6,000 square metres of prime real estate in the middle of La Rambla, Barcelona's main thoroughfare. More than 300 stalls lining 11 perpetually packed aisles bulge with legs of fragrant jabugo ham from acorn-fed Iberian pigs; strings of chorizo, morcilla and butifarra sausages; plump, fat cabbages; exotic wild mushrooms; mountains of dried salt cod; a forest floor's worth of wild mushrooms; and prized tails from fighting bulls. Best of all is the seafood market, where dolled-up matriarchs sporting dramatic earrings dispense curious-looking percebes (goose barnacles), razor clams, tiny baby eels, sardines and gleaming sea bass. Stop at the tiny Bar Pinoxto, where the bow-tied Juanito will serve you a café con leche, a tortilla, or a salt-cod croquette. And you haven't lived until you've had a market breakfast of tripe and red wine.”

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