Burgos Fiestas #3: Tapas galore

Spaniards enjoy an outdoor tapas booth during the festival.

Spaniards love to eat.  That was something that was reflected by the tapas stands set up throughout the city for the recent festivals of Burgos.  For those of you who don’t know what a “tapa” is, it’s basically a bite-sized portion of food served on a plate and usually accompanied by a small glass of wine or a cold draft.  Most of the time, you get tapas in bars; however, during the festivals of Burgos, stands like the one pictured above were placed all over the city streets and the bars served their tapas outside from these stands all week long. 

For me, having these stands on the street during the festivals gave people a really great chance to socialize.  Spaniards, of course, never spent too much time at any one stand; instead, they went from stand to stand to sample the wide variety of tapas.  As they were moving from stand to stand and sampling the wide array of “goodies” to eat, they ran into old friends and met new people.  It was really a great thing.  In fact, I loved the whole “tapas on the street” atmosphere during last week’s festival — I went with my friends to try the foods from the various bars and ran into a lot of people that I knew along the way and got to “catch up” with them.  Good food and good friends, what more could you ask for? 

For this post, I’d like to ask that you comment about your favorite tapa or Spanish food in general.  We’ll have to see if we can come up with one definitive “favorite” from Spain (I personally think coming up with one favorite will be hard to do).  

This post is part of a mini-series about the 2009 Burgos Festivals.  To read about other aspects of the Burgos Fiestas, check out my Burgos Fiestas 2009 page.  You also may be interested in checking out my Fiesta Photos on Picasa. 

Hasta luego,
–Chris
http://abroadinspain.com