Mercado Central, Alicante.

Mercado Central opened on 12 November 1922. The first stone had been laid eleven years earlier by King Alfonso XIII himself — which tells you something about how seriously Alicante took its food supply.

The building was designed by architect Francisco Fajardo Guardiola and completed by Juan Vidal Ramos. The style is eclectic with strong Valencian modernist influences — the kind of architecture that was built to last and looks like it knows it.

It nearly didn't last. On 25 May 1938, nine Italian aircraft flying from Mallorca dropped bombs on the city. Several hit the market directly. More than 300 people were killed and over a thousand injured — one of the deadliest single attacks of the entire Spanish Civil War. The square behind the market is still called Plaza 25 de Mayo. The name is not decorative.

The market was rebuilt, survived the rest of the twentieth century, and closed for a full renovation in 1987. Four years later it reopened — same bones, updated everything else.

Today it covers 11,100 square metres across two floors, with 292 stalls and over a hundred years of uninterrupted trading behind it. The largest municipal market in Spain, as it happens.

Everything here is worth your attention — but not everything here is impossible to find elsewhere.

Fruit and vegetables are excellent. But if you have a good Thursday or Saturday market near you, the quality is comparable. The real reason to come to Mercado Central is the floors dedicated to fish and meat.

The fish hall is on a different level to anything a supermarket can offer — in variety, in freshness, and in the kind of cuts and species that simply don't make it onto supermarket shelves. If you cook fish seriously, this is where you shop.

The meat section is the same story. The range is wider, the quality is noticeably different, and the people behind the counters know what they're selling.

One section that most visitors walk past without stopping: the stalls selling jamón and cured meat products. Ready-to-eat, cut to order, and at a standard that makes the vacuum-packed supermarket version feel like a different product entirely. Worth stopping at even if you only buy a small amount to eat that day.