Alcalá de Henares

Your Spanish experience is not complete until you've had tapas, which are small appetizers served along with your drink.

Alcalá is known for its almendras, a sugar-coated almond candy. You can get them at El Convento de San Clarisas de San Diego, a cloistered abbey where the nuns make the candies with nothing but "almonds, sugar and love."

At restaurants and taverns in Alcala it is possible to taste typical dishes that bring us memories from “El Quijote” passages. Garlic soup, migas bread crumbs with sausages and eggs, and a wide range of other dishes cooked with fresh vegetables from the fertile lowland of the Henares, plus the most tasteful lamb and astrid roasts.

Cervantes home town reproduces, at the doors of twenty first century, that cooking from “El Quijote” that reflects habits and usages from the Spanish Golden Century thanks to the Cervantes Gastronomy Days that are being organized by the City Hall and Fomentur since 1997 at the end of September; during these days main restaurants in Alcala make curious menus inspired in the great work by Cervantes that can be enjoyed at reasonable prices.Every year in February there is also another Gastronomy week.