Mercado del Arenal: A Market on a Prison
Why is it significant?
Walk into the hall and the noise hits you first: knives on boards, fishmongers calling out, the hiss of an espresso machine at a stall in the corner. Then the smell of the sea. Prawns, cuttlefish, sardines and fat anchovies lie on beds of crushed ice, a short drive from the Atlantic coast.
Key Facts
| Place | Mercado del Arenal: A Market on a Prison |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle Pastor y Landero, 41001 Sevilla, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 37.38770, -5.99910 |
| Part of Walk | Seville Tapas and Convent Sweets: Hidden Nuns, Old Markets and the Oldest Bar in Town |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into the hall and the noise hits you first: knives on boards, fishmongers calling out, the hiss of an espresso machine at a stall in the corner. Then the smell of the sea. Prawns, cuttlefish, sardines and fat anchovies lie on beds of crushed ice, a short drive from the Atlantic coast.
The Mercado del Arenal was built in 1947 to a design by the Sevillian architect Juan Talavera y Heredia, and it was first named the market of the entradores, the wholesale dealers. But the ground it stands on has a darker past. This was the site of the Pópulo, a former convent that served for many years as one of the city's prisons. Seville replaced a jail with a larder, which feels like a sound decision.
This is also the right place to talk about the word tapa, which simply means lid. The most popular story says that a barman would cover a glass of wine with a slice of bread or ham to keep out flies and dust, and the lid became the snack. Another legend credits a king who supposedly ordered that wine always be served with a bite of food, so that his subjects would not get drunk. Nobody has proved either version, and Sevillians are happy to tell both.
What is certain is how Sevillians use their tapas. A tapa is not a starter. It is a way of moving through a city: a small plate here, another there, standing, talking, a few steps to the next bar. The drink that goes with it is often a caña, a small glass of very cold draught beer. In a city where summer afternoons pass forty degrees, a small glass is not stinginess, it is engineering: you finish it before it warms up. Seville has brewed its own beer since 1904, when the Cruzcampo brewery was founded on the edge of the city.
Fried fish, by the way, is a Sevillian art: dusted in flour, plunged in very hot olive oil, served in a paper cone. Now walk north-east through Calle Zaragoza, cross the Plaza Nueva and follow Calle Tetuán to the Plaza de la Campana, where the most famous pastry shop in Seville has been waiting since 1885.