El Mercado de Santiago

There’s an old woman sitting on a wooden box with a basket of the first of the season’s padrón peppers on a low wooden table in front of her. She sits in the pale light of a spring morning. Behind her grows lichen on the roughly hewn granite wall, nourished by Santiago’s frequent rain and damp air. Like most towns across Spain, Santiago’s mercado is the town’s centre of shopping, as opposed to a shopping centre. Some markets, like Barcelona’s Boqueria, have become famous and are now packed with tourists by mid morning. Madrid has its ageing municipal markets — concrete buildings from the late 1960s that have a brutal charm of their own.