Spain Explained is the podcast for people who want to understand Spanish culture, Spanish food, and Spanish traditions beyond the guidebook basics. Hosted by award-winning author and cook Marti Buckley, who's lived in Spain since 2010, this show unpacks the concepts, rituals, and quirks that make Spain… Spain.Whether you're planning a trip to Spain, obsessed with Spanish cuisine, dreaming of moving there, or just curious why lunch can last four hours, this podcast translates the untranslatable. Each episode dives into one single part of Spanish life, from sobremesa to siesta, café con leche to jamón ibérico, and explains what it is and why it matters.Marti is the author of cookbooks including The Book of Pintxos and Basque Country, writes for Condé Nast Traveler, The Telegraph, and Food & Wine,, and founded the International Society for the Preservation and Enjoyment of Vermouth. She's your insider guide to Spanish culture, Spanish daily life, and Spanish food traditions.This podcas
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Spain Explained is a society podcast hosted by Marti Buckley, with 31 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.
About the host
Marti Buckley hosts Spain Explained, a society show with 31 episodes published.
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Spain Explained
What is Rioja? (EP 31)
Aug 18, 202624 min
Sell a bottle of Gran Reserva Rioja before its fifth birthday and the region will fine you. Rioja is a wine denomination in northern Spain, strung along the Ebro across some 65,000 hectares of La Rioja, Basque Álava and a corner of Navarra, overwhelmingly red, overwhelmingly Tempranillo, and built around a legal promise that somebody already did the aging for you. It became Spain's first Denominación de Origen in 1925. In this episode, Marti Buckley explains how phylloxera in France sent Bordeaux merchants south in the 1860s carrying small barrels and long aging, why traditional Rioja tastes how it does, what crianza, reserva and gran reserva guarantee by law, and how a wave of growers pushing single-vineyard and village wines is rewriting a hundred-year-old system that has only ever measured time in oak. If you want more about Spain: ∙ Subscribe to Marti's Substack at https://substack.com/@martibuckley ∙ Follow her on Instagram @ martibuckley ∙ Visit her blog at travelcookeat.com
Not every pastry has its own aviation policy. The ensaimada is a coiled Mallorcan spiral, its pork lard dough stretched nearly transparent, baked and buried under powdered sugar, and the Balearic government once calculated that around forty of them fly out on every plane bound for the mainland. The earliest written record sits in a Palma convent ledger from 1642, though both leading theories about who first coiled one point to bakers whose religion prohibited pork, a contradiction that runs through the expulsions and forced conversions of the 1490s. Marti Buckley traces that origin debate, explains the European protection now governing the name, names the three Palma bakeries worth the walk, weighs the filled-versus-plain argument, and lays out how a two-euro breakfast pastry forced Ryanair into a public retreat. If you want more about Spain: ∙ Subscribe to Marti's Substack at https://substack.com/@martibuckley ∙ Follow her on Instagram @ martibuckley ∙ Visit her blog at www.travelcookeat.com
Spain won the 2026 World Cup while conceding just one goal across the entire tournament, a first for any champion, with a squad that included (for the first time ever) zero Real Madrid players. So let's talk fútbol! Football. Soccer. In Spain, it's big. In this episode, Spain Explained talks about the machinery behind that win: the canteras, literally quarries, where clubs like Barcelona and Athletic train children from age seven, the web of more than 21,000 registered clubs and town-hall leagues that feeds them, and the fútbol sala courts credited with forging Spanish ball control. Learn about the 100,000 dues-paying members that own Barcelona outright. Or why Athletic Club has fielded only Basque players for over a century without ever being relegated. And how a league with no playoff stays tense until the final matchday. Plus the rituals around the game: four daily print sports newspapers, radio marathons on air since 1954, and la quiniela at the tobacco shop. If you want more about Spain: ∙ Subscribe to Marti's Substack at https://substack.com/@martibuckley ∙ Follow her on Instagram @ martibuckley ∙ Visit her blog at travelcookeat.com
On the last Wednesday of August, in a small town in Valencia, 20,000 people have a gigantic food fight of somewhere around 150 tonnes of overripe tomatoes. That is La Tomatina, held in Buñol near Valencia and certified by Guinness as the largest annual food fight in the world. What the ...why do they do this? Listen to this episode to find out everything about this famous fiesta: the soaped pole with a whole ham at the top that comes first, the seven trucks filled with tomatoes, the rocket at eleven and the rocket at noon that stops everyone at once. Host Marti Buckley gets into where the tomatoes come from, how to participate, and where this fascinating Spanish tradition started (hint...it was a long time ago). If you want more about Spain: ∙ Subscribe to Marti's Substack at https://substack.com/@martibuckley ∙ Follow her on Instagram @ martibuckley ∙ Visit her blog at travelcookeat.com
The town most associated with octopus in all of Spain sits 90 kilometers from the nearest coastline, with no port and no boats, yet every August it serves around 33 tons of it in a single day. That inland paradox is the key to the whole story. In this episode, Marti Buckley traces how pulpo became the signature dish of Galicia, and why it happened inland instead of on the coast: through twelfth-century monks who collected octopus as tribute, dried stiff for the journey over the hills; through the pulpeiras of Arcos who turned boiling it into a prestige craft passed mother to daughter; and through the Leonese mule drivers who carried the olive oil and pimentón north. She sorts pulpo á feira from pulpo a la gallega, explains why most Spanish octopus now arrives through foreign ports, and lays out how champion pulpeiros cook it, from the freezer to the wooden plate. If you want more about Spain: ∙ Subscribe to Marti's Substack at https://substack.com/@martibuckley ∙ Follow her on Instagram @martibuckley ∙ Visit her blog at travelcookeat.com
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