Spanish Pedazos #8

Similar to Guatemala's quesadillas (though arguably both yummier and more artery-clogging) quesadas are a speciality of the region of Cantabria in Spain.

Other than a kilogram of cheese, the recipe usually also includes a heady mix of eggs, flour, milk, nutmeg and occasionally, yogurt.

As you can see from this pic, they are mixed up in a human-machine hybrid process which includes a certain amount of forearm movement!

Spanish Pedazos #7

V standing above the little Asturian fishing village of Cudillero, whose residents speak the unique Spanish dialect of Pixueto. Every 28th of June a long poem written in this tongue outlining the events of the previous year is recited to a figure of St Peter as part of the village's fiestas patronales.

The northern route of the Camino de Santiago passes through here so there's a pilgrim hostal down below in the main town, where big battleship-grey seagulls swoop out of the sky like Stukas and visitors fleeing them are likely to slip in the many puddles of cider left by the locals' highly visual but somewhat wasteful serving technique.

Legend has it that the Vikings first discovered and settled this cove on the northern coast of the peninsula.

Taken July 2004.

Spanish Pedazos #6

Asturias aka el pais de los quesos is a veritable treasure trove of edible productos artesanos. My mouth waters at the recollection of it.

Here in Antigua the cheese situation is generally less favourable. And I say this the morning after having grated the last little chunk of Parmesan I brought back with me in June....Parmesan from Reggio that is, as opposed to queso parmesano from Tegucigalpa.

The mainstream shops here mostly stock poor Central American simulcra of already insipid gringo imitations of real cheese: chafa not cheddar!

Step upmarket (into say Epicure but porfa not Sabe Rico, regretably a bit of a bare-faced estafa) and you can find premium old world staples from Switzerland — decribed in The White Tiger as "a small , beautiful country in Europe full of white people and black money" — and Holland. But not a whiff of say Camembert or Manchego.

Locally-produced queso seco goes well sprinkled over frijoles and the queso de pueblo has a pleasingly creamy texture. The salty ricotta-like requesón, made from the first cut of the cheese, is also rather scrumptious.

For much of last year we were buying our queso de capas from don Andres, a charming itinerant who reaches our road from his home town of Patulul at around 11am every Friday. Unfortunately, once I'd whittled down the suspects in the case of our occasional bowl problems, don Andres's layer-set cheese looked in imminent need of legal counsel. We still buy his cream though.

Nothing produced here however is quite a match for the famous string cheese of Oaxaca — el quesillo — though one can make do with the ersatz versions flogged by the La Cuna del Queso (Taxisco).

Spanish Pedazos #5

Another view from the village of Cahecho, Cantabria. It's the kind of place where you can still see highly compact little Spanish viejas carrying buckets to be filled with water at a the hand-crankable iron pump at the lower end of this incline.

Spanish Pedazos #4

Drive south from Comillas and the road steepens as one enters the Cantabrian end of the Picos de Europa. At the summit of one inviting lane leading up into these mountains we found the slightly crumbly-looking village of Cahecho, and checked ourselves into the family-run Casa Lamadrid, the only inn taking in overnight guests that evening.

In this pic, a farmhouse is partially hidden by beanstalks. These are the famous judías verdes of the region, which turned up at dinnertime in a viscous soup form — a tripa-turbulento concoction packed off with the local 50%+ aguardiente known as orujo, distilled from the pomace of the grape.

Spanish Pedazos #3

Comillas, a mecca for expensive recreation in the latter part of the nineteenth century, duly became a playground for vacationing Catalan modernists.

Joan Martorell's Sobrellano Palace flaunts a farrago of quoted architectural styles amongst which the English perpendicular gothic and the Venetian predominate. The building was commissioned by the first Marquis of Comillas and inaugurated in 1888.

Spanish Pedazos #2

It may not be difficult to spot Moorish decorative flourishes in La Antigua but the basic model for domestic architecture in the colonies fell just outside the Caliphate: the mountainous north, especially Asturias, Cantabria and Navarra. This is after all a land of densely wooded contours, cooler and wetter than the plains to the south.

The Spanish empire may have radiated out from Seville, but Andalucia was deforested in order to produce the great fleets it depended on, and today the patios of the lower half of the peninsula tend to feature colonnades constructed from stone rather than wood.

This image comes from the picturesque Cantabrian seaside town of Comillas which we visited for the first time in 2002. The houses are made with locally quarried stone, but the incorporation of terraza española attests to a technique that was to be transplanted successfully to Central and South America.

Spanish Pedazos #1

A new series of images from the Howard archives. First up, an extended set of photos taken on our various journeys around the Iberian peninsula. This one shows the dense concrete ceiling of the Islamic bathhouse at the Alhambra punctured with motifs that will be familiar to anyone who has wandered the streets of Antigua.