Category: Castellón

Burriana / Castellón / Cooking / Food / Holidays

A fancy calçotada and some Holy Week pomp

A few days before taking off for a spring break trip to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Tenerife, we spent the second weekend of April around home because we were invited to a calçotada in Vila-Real! This traditional spring festival of Catalan origin celebrates the calçot, a very specific kind of spring onion that is traditionally fire-roasted, wrapped in newspaper, then peeled and eaten by hand while wearing gloves. It is also dipped in romesco sauce (delicious, and probably the reason why we needed the bibs) before it makes its way to mouths and bellies. Dreamer just couldn’t get it right, though.

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Castellón / Holidays

Magdalena and the case of the overlapping festivos

We experienced an overabundance of festivals in March when two regional celebrations converged in one nearly sleepless weekend (from which – at the end of May – we have yet to recover). Magdalena, the main festival in nearby Castellón de la Plana, known for its pilgrimage and its large monuments of light, began the last weekend of las Fallas.  Despite its proximity to us, we didn’t see much of la Magdalena – only stopping by for a couple of hours to watch a procession before heading home to see the bonfires marking the end of Fallas. Honestly, after a week full of Fallas parades, fireworks, and not enough sleep, we were

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Castellón / Tourism / Valencia

Where good Banjo Boys and Girls come from

We spent the first weekend of March doing some fun activities at home, too, and we managed to stayed just as busy as our previous weekend at home. This time around, we filled our days and nights with a quirky museum, a spa, a parade, rice, pyrotechnics, porcelain figurines, and horchata (sounds like a lot, but to be fair, our weekends are three days – yes, our life is rough).   Saturday: Spa, playing card museum, and a surprise parade Playing card games are quite possibly an even more popular pastime in Spain than in America, and that’s saying something because we

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Castellón / Food / Holidays

¡Juega! Carnaval, truffles, and fútbol

Sometimes, that one weekend hits where you know you need to remain home because fun stuff is going on all around you. The last weekend of February was like this for us. Saturday: Carnaval in Vinaròs About an hour north of us in our province, Vinaròs is famed for having the best Brazilian-style Carnaval around. Since Lent was coming, we thought we should check it out. We arrived with a little bit of time before the parade and decided to check out the town. Needless to say, we did not leave disappointed. Once the parade began, it was a nonstop party. We

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Castellón / Cooking / Food / Tourism

Onda: Castle, ceramics, and paella

We managed to fit another castle into our schedule last month during an overcast weekend spent recovering near home after our epic trip to Copenhagen. We also visited a ceramics museum and Doer learned some new techniques for making paella – but first, the castle! Onda’s castle once was known as the Castle of 300 Towers, and according to Guía Total de la Comunidad Valenciana (our resident guidebook of the Valencian Community), these towers allowed Muslims in Onda to resist King James I the Conqueror for years, even after the nearby city of Burriana, where we live, was taken in 1233. The Moors built

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Castellón / Tourism

The worst flavor of soda

*Since literally five minutes after I looked up the location we’d been placed in Spain on a map, my puerile mind has been obsessed with the name of a nearby town: Peñíscola. To us, the tilde and accent there seem pretty important; to the Spaniards, it Ain’t no Thang and is in fact well-known as a beautiful beachside town with a sweet old castle. We had to visit. This was a location that needed to wait to visit until we had a car due to the lack of convenient rail service. Thus, with car in tow, it was a clear winner for somewhere to go

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