Golden bites in the golden city
Salamanca is famed for its golden-hued buildings, but it’s pork not pigments that really makes this city shine, finds Josh Martin.
Salamanca is known as The Golden City. Such is the effect of the intense Spanish rays illuminating the old town’s buildings made from local sandstone. We’re told the sandstone morphs from off-white to a brilliant bronze as the buildings age, so its oldest look the most stunning at sunset.
Today, Salamanca is far from golden. It is grey. For days it had been a golden beacon in my phone’s otherwise dire weather forecast: a promise of midNovember sun and warmth. I had pictured a jug of fruit-filled sangria being poured into two chilled glasses on the city’s main square.
Instead our Emerald Cruise tour group, who have left behind Portugal’s Douro River for a bit of Spanish sunshine, shuffled towards Plaza Mayor in puffer jackets and scarves: this was not my Iberian ideal. My eyes darted around for sangria and tapas plates – padron peppers, chorizo, perhaps? Not one. Tables were empty.
Christina, our host, instead fed us a constant stream of facts: the Mayor town square is one of the largest on the Iberian peninsula. It was, at one time, the city’s bull-fighting ring, which explains why many of the apartments bordering Plaza Mayor have balconies.
It was home to the town hall, but these baroque beauties are mostly privately owned and now it is the owners who charge like a raging bull when it comes to rent – so the aggressive history of the city’s focal point lives on.
A highly walkable city, Salamanca next revealed to us the grand facades of its historic university, the fourth-oldest in Europe behind Bologna, Paris and Oxford. Intricate carvings in the caramel sandstone showed the city has had money as long as it has had knowledge, which is a very long time – the university was founded by King Alfonso of Leon in 1218 and turned 800 in 2018.
As we studied the carvings, a huge countdown timer ticked down beside us. This birthday was being taken very seriously. The university was one factor that enshrined Salamanca as ‘‘the home of the Spanish language’’, an ideal backed up by the students of every colour passing by speaking it as if it was their mother tongue.
But I didn’t come to brush up on my (nonexistent) Spanish skills. I came for the ham, or jamon iberico de bellota. Salamanca is ground zero in the world of Iberian ham aficionados. The coveted black-hoofed piggies, pata negra to the locals, devour acorns that fall from the trees in the prairies surrounding Salamanca. The right pig, on the right diet, cured for the right number of months, creates the most melt-in-your-mouth wafers of savoury delight.
While the famed Serrano ham of Spain’s eastern reaches is prized as well, it is the jamon that reaches top dollar. It’s those fatty acorns that do it, said a ham hawker at the city’s Central Market, who offers little morsels of the salty delicacy.
Christina said something about the relative youth of the market hall, something about it ‘‘not being in the typical baroque style of Salamanca’’ but our group’s collective minds were pork-drunk and wondering the etiquette of getting our trotters on another jamon sample. The freebies strategy worked a treat, and soon the queue to buy meaty souvenirs at his stall grew longer.
Ham had awoken my appetite. Adios to the tour group: it was tapas time. And for small bites, in a small city, they packed a lot of punch.
Rare pork fillet served simply with local salt and a smear of date cream got us off to a perfect start at iPan iVino, a rather hip sherry and small plates outfit, which specialises in the sweet wines of south-western Spain. The creole inspired Iberian pork burrito left us in certainty of which meat product was Salamanca’s favourite.
The golden city outside remained bleak after this first course, so we decided to spend the remainder of our time in a tapas crawl. As if the city was affirming us taking this approach, our next snack stop was named Tapas 2.0.
Seated at the long bar we devoured some patatas bravas, crisp green gazpacho or melon, prawn and coriander as well as some silky smooth Riojan reds. Back to the shaded porticos of Plaza Mayor before meeting the cruise crew, we (barely) fitted in a couple of morsels of cod croquettes with local blood sausage and looked out as glove and hat-clad locals hurried across the deserted city square.
Although the rays weren’t guaranteed in The Golden City, little bites of sunshine were easy to come by.
The author was a guest of Emerald Waterways.