I still haven’t been. But I have now had some authentic (at least it seemed that way from what I’ve read and seen on TV) South American food. I still want to go to South America by the way.Today we went to Mijas to have a look at the ‘Festival Internacional de los Pueblos’.
Mijas is a small, whitewashed Andalucian village in the hills to the North of Fuengirola on the Costa del Sol. It’s a very pretty place but rather touristy. Probably because it’s so pretty. And it has a great views down to the Mediterranean sea.
It has a small central square (Plaza Virgen de la Peña), which is where the feria was held. There were a number of stalls selling the same old handmade jewellery that you see all over the coast (no offence to the craftsmen) but far more interestingly it had food stalls representing countries from predominantly South and Central America and some European.
The first stall that we stumbled upon was a Uruguayan BBQ stall. I have never seen such a big BBQ. My salivary glands kicked into action. Right next to it was a Uruguayan cake stall and opposite it a wood-fired-oven bread stall (also Uruguayan). We kept on meandering around the square and discovered Spanish (no surprise there), Finnish, Argentinian, Cuban, Indian, Italian, Jamaican, Brazilian, Swedish, British… the only problem was, it was just after 12 o’clock and none of the food seemed ready to eat yet. We should have remembered where we were and that lunch in Spain doesn’t really kick off until about 2pm.We both had our eyes (and stomachs) set on the Uruguayan BBQ for our main lunch, but we were both really quite hungry. There was no option but to have a few snacks to keep us going. A couple of Argentinian empanadas (pasties) and an Italian sausage puff did the job. Finally the Uruguayan BBQ was ready.
We went for a mixed meat platter. €10 for a plate of chips, chicken, sausage, black pudding, pork belly and some top quality steak. So good. Mr H said if we’d gone to Mijas yesterday (the feria was on then too) we would have gone back again today. I agree. It was really really good.
