A version of this article originally appeared in Condé Nast Traveller UK.
The chef José Pizarro buzzes through the covered market in Barbate at speed–past flamenco buskers holding their guitars up to their chins, and pomegranates, dragon fruit, and crab’s feet—making a beeline for razor clams and bluefin tuna, called atún rojo in Spain for its ruby flesh. The bluefin and its almadraba fishing method have been prized for centuries in these coastal towns. Barbate, like nearby Conil, Zahara, and Tarifa, is built around this ancient practice. And, after some years of controlled fishing, the spring harvest is back: a great haul of enormous fish, many weighing up to 450 pounds, which spend winter in the depths of the Atlantic, building a buttery layer of fat that makes the belly, the ventrecha, meltingly good.
I scurry in Pizarro’s wake. “I loooove it here,” he enthuses, pocketing volcanic black salt and La Breña pine nuts. “It’s a mercado del pueblo, for the people. The old ladies who come here to buy one fish stay all morning. A tostada and coffee is €1.50.” Pizarro seems to know every stall holder. “Andalusian people are quite cheeky. I had to tell some of them, ‘Don’t give me a bad tomato again.’ They slip them in.” We gather up almond-truffled dark chocolates from the confitería, sink a couple of Cruzcampos and some chicharrónes, and bounce home. There’s cooking to be done.
Home is Iris Zahara, which Pizarro bought with his partner Peter Meades in 2021 after scouring the coast. It clings to the cliff near Zahara de los Atunes, a glassy modernist white cuboid with terracotta terraces. They’ve filled it with interesting art; a vast canvas from Tracey Emin’s A Journey to Death series hangs in their bedroom.
CádizØivind Haug
Casa La SiestaØivind Haug
Hailing from a pastoral village near Caceres, Pizarro wanted a coastal Spanish antidote to his London townhouse life; somewhere to bring friends, his beloved mother (who introduced him to good food but always shooed him from the kitchen), and clients who want the thrill of being cooked for by Pizarro at home. And maybe somewhere for the cameras: the chef, cookbook author, and owner of seven restaurants is loved by Britain mostly because he’s on Saturday Kitchen a lot. His effervescent fizz is organized and channelled by Meades, a Welsh psychotherapist whom Pizarro calls Pedro, who dispenses care, stiff vodka martinis, and Cardiff wit. Together they create a timelessly appealing drinks-topped-up hospitality.
“He loves being able to drink and dance and listen to music while cooking, and we are in love with the ever-changing sea,” says Meades. From their terrace, you peer across a vast oceanic panorama that glitters and glints and rages and rolls. Africa seems close enough to touch when the Rif mountains appear like a cut-out on the horizon and the lights of Tangier twinkle across the gloam of the Strait of Gibraltar at night—at least when the levante and poniente winds aren’t raging up a storm.
Two words you hear ad infinitum in Andalusia’s Cádiz province are levante and poniente. The levante is the easterly blow favored by windsurfers that causes heavy swells, casts apocalyptic clouds, and gives shins an unwanted microdermabrasion. The poniente is the westerly, which comes off the Atlantic. When this arrives, the kitesurfers start jumping. The oppositional winds dictate the ebb and flow of life on the coast.
Pomegranate treeØivind Haug
Salmorejo soup at Iris ZaharaØivind Haug
They also hint at the character of the “Coast of Light.” The last stretch of Spain’s southern Atlantic coast is no bourgeois, sun-kissed costa, but a land of endless dunes, swirling estuaries and Wild West horizons daubed with fast-moving clouds. Moorish pueblos blancos dust the hills like icing sugar, and there’s a vast richness to the ridges and marshes of the national parks that buffer the coast’s extremities.
