Welcome to Barcelona's most famous food market, La Boqueria. A covered market with hundreds of stalls devoted to nothing but food, it is arguably one of the most beautiful markets in the world.


Walking into the market is known to give even spaghetti-and-hamburger diehards an urge to push their culinary boundaries, and true foodies tend to lose themselves for hours. In the age of big supermarkets like Carrefour that are a short metro ride away and many grocery stores dot the city center, the market not only persists, it thrives.
Food professional Pep Palau has a bird's eye view of it all. As the head of the Forum Gastronomic, which he describes as "the meeting place for food professionals," not only does he see the market's importance for chefs and home cooks, he has a greater sense of its gastronomic high place and how it stays there.

He says

Like most successful enterprises, it's not easy to define what exactly makes La Boqueria work. The key, says Palau, rests in the sum of its parts. "It's a bunch of little things, but what they've done is something much bigger."

"It's become a cult place in Spain's new gastronomy.This is reflected in the clientele, which ranges from tourists who wander the aisles with cups of fresh-squeezed fruit juice to well-known chefs who stock up on the best produce to create a style of food known in Catalan as cuina de mercat.

It's authentic, it's beautiful, it's easy to get to, and it's prestigious.If you talk to chefs, they talk about it.

The market has become a space where if you go to Barcelona, you go there. People even prefer it to museums.

It has become something of a specialty store.The prices are the highest in Barcelona.

There is nothing to disagree with what he says. This market is truly beautiful!