Market · Irún

Mercado de San Juan

Tucked into the heart of Irún's old town, the Mercado de San Juan is where locals have shopped for pintxos ingredients, fresh anchovies and Idiazabal cheese for generations. Arrive on a Saturday morning and the stalls hum with the kind of unhurried energy that reminds you food here is still a serious pleasure.

What to buy and taste

The fish counter alone is worth the visit: glistening kokotxas, fat sardines and the prized anchovies of the Bidasoa estuary sit on beds of crushed ice just metres from the Spanish-French border that supplies them.

Local txistorra sausage, cider-washed Basque cheeses and hand-tied bunches of Gernika peppers fill the adjacent stalls — grab a paper cone of fried anchovies from the hot-food corner and eat standing up like everyone else.

The social ritual around the market

After shopping, vendors and regulars alike drift to the bar tables ringing the ground floor for a glass of txakoli and a quick pintxo of tortilla or bacalao — this is the real Irún morning, unhurried and convivial.

The building itself, a mid-20th-century iron-and-tile structure, has been sensitively restored; the light that falls through its clerestory windows onto the produce is genuinely beautiful and worth photographing.

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