Zahara de la Sierra Gastronomy

Clean air and pure water, mielato de quercus (holm oaks, gall oaks and cork oaks) and tireless bees gives us its best sweet honey with an chestnut colour and a strong vegetal flavour: the forest's honey.

It's autumn time and the valleys and rivers share time with noble chestnut trees. Each leaf of each tree turns a deep red gold. It's time for eagles to fly, time to light fires and time to toast sweet chestnuts.

Apart from the variety and richess, our humid and dense forests offers the goddess' delicacy: the mushroom. Different kinds and delicious flavours, born of the ground.

Other nature's products are offered as well, like the fresh and biological vegetables, legumes, olives, fruits, wild asparagus, Spanish oister plant, snails, game meat, being the base for a diverse and delicious traditional cooking.

The characteristics of the fruits raised at a certain ecosystem are caused by the place's conditions: altitude, ground, climatology... giving to the fruits authenticity and distinction. Due to these reasons, the olive of the Serrania, at its optimal ripeness, brings to the life to its most noble esence, the olive oil, being made in Cuevas del Becerro, Atajate, Jubrique, El Burgo and Yunquera at the tradtional olive-oil mills, giving us a pure olive oil, a real treasure for our health.

In Zahara de la Sierra, where the best olive groves are combined with the best extraction techniques, a pure olive oil is obtained, with a low acidity, with a golden colour with traces of green, with an intense fragance and a wonderful taste. A real "Dorado" for the Serrania.

As a result of choosing always the best raw materials, the blond or violet pigs, raised in a natural and healthy environment, consisting of holm oaks forests, which give to them the necessary amount of acorns. Then seasoning, a slow process that ends with the cured jam, due to the adequate environment and climatology. This is how the Iberian cold cuts of the Serrania de Ronda are offered to you: chorizo, salchichas, different kind of pork spiced sausages. Delicious and uncomparable flavours coming from Zahara de la Sierra to Cortes de la Frontera, passing through Montejaque, Algatocín or Benaoján where the cold cuts tradition is a precious heritage from generation to generation.

Territory and pure milk: capricious goats tended, over the varied region's vegetation, accuracy and love of the process of making cheese, wisdom and patience. These are the main factors for cheeses, offering us several flavours and tasteful sensations, from the sweetest or milky to the stronger personalities!. A walk through Zahara de la Sierra will offer you the possibility of knowing our cheesy patrimony.

Lots of wisdom, work and love are the combination of noble ingredients: flours, honey, almonds, lard, figs, chestnuts, liqueurs and spices, bringing to life a huge amount of handmade sweets: types of doughnuts, cheeses made of almonds, wine doughnuts, oil or honey cakes and egg yolk sweets, delicacies from several centuries. Many of the sweets are made by the nuns of the convents La Merced and las Franciscanas, are famous and delicious.