The last calçots of the season mark the beginning of Barcelona's spring. Grab a batch on our Made in Catalonia walk while you still can!

Some sociologists say that Spanish society and culture can’t be properly understood without spending time in its bars. You can find bars in mountain refuges, subway stations, on the beach and by the highway. In Barcelona, there are as many bars as taxis and ten times more bars than bookshops. In fact, a recent study by Coca-Cola found that in Spain there’s a bar for every 132 Spaniards. The same study points out that a third of Spaniards wouldn’t hesitate to leave their house keys at their local bar and that two-thirds of them are on a first-name basis with the employees there.

It all started with a seriously delicious hamburger in New York City. Rumor has it that it was this burger that first gave acclaimed Catalan chef Oriol Rovira the idea of opening Sagàs Pagesos y Cuiners (“Farmers and Cooks”) in the Born district of Barcelona. Specializing in high-end sandwiches, the restaurant embraces the farm-to-table philosophy, with a menu that is both distinctively Catalan and international in scope. Rovira, who also runs Els Casals, a Michelin-starred restaurant in the tiny village of Sagàs near the edge of the Pyrenees, opened his sandwich spot in May 2011. As at Els Casals, nearly all of the food at the Barcelona venue comes straight from the chef’s village farm. But why sandwiches?

Jordi Piquer opened his popular restaurant in 1968 on an auspicious day: April 23, a holiday that honors his namesake saint. Saint Jordi must have been looking down on Piquer and his dedicated customers when the restaurateur decided to sell his establishment in 1986: three trusted employees banded together to buy it, keeping the Sant Gervasi neighborhood institution in business. A fine example of a classic 20th-century Barcelona restaurant, Casa Jordi is decorated in the old masía (traditional Catalan farmhouse) style over two floors but adapted to urban dimensions, meaning that there are fewer intimate corners but larger, more flexible rooms with tables for groups.

In the southwestern part of Catalonia, in the province of Lleida, lies Les Garrigues, where the gray-green foliage of compact Arbequina olive trees stretches across some 20,000 hectares of the soft, dry landscape. This is where one of Spain’s best extra-virgin olive oils is produced. The olive tree has been cultivated in Catalonia since at least ancient Roman times, although it was probably first introduced by the Greeks in 600 BCE. Its cultivation developed alongside other typical crops that flourish in a dry climate – such as almonds, grains and grapes – until growing olives and producing olive oil became the main industry of Les Garrigues in the 19th century.

We can't get enough of the Syrian shawarma, humus and falafel at Salem Kabbaz's El Cocinero de Damasco in Barcelona. Born in 1945, Kabbaz came to Barcelona in 1980 and has worked in restaurants in the city ever since.

Between two simple slices of bread exists a mind-boggling array of possibilities – something not lost on Spaniards, who have turned sandwich making into something of an art form. In Spain, sandwiches go by different names depending on the kind of bread used and local custom. The type that’s generally called a bocadillo in Spanish and entrepà in Catalan traditionally comes on pan de barra, itself a broad category of bread, with varying dimensions, qualities and more specific names, including baguette, maybe chapata (ciabatta), depending on how round the bakery makes it, pistola (pistol) in Madrid and flautas (flutes) in Barcelona if it’s short and very thin.

Coal candy (yes, completely edible) is among treats we encountered over the holidays on our Made in Catalonia walk in the heart of Barcelona's Gràcia district.

Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Portugal, Morocco, Tunisia – one thing that unites this swathe of the Mediterranean is olive oil, whose use in the Fertile Crescent can be traced back to 6000 B.C.E. Olives arrived in the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula around 9th century B.C.E. with the Phoenicians. Ancient Rome saw huge quantities of olive oil from Hispania Baetica (currently Andalucía) being transported throughout the Roman Empire in millions of amphorae (made in Baetica). Spain leads production of olive oil to this day, with 45 percent of the global total. The majority (65 percent) of Spanish olive oil production is sold to Italy, where this oil is mixed with others (normally of the same quality, but not always) and sold under an Italian label.

Pinxtos are tiny servings of tapas that come in countless varieties, many of which can be sampled on our Made in Catalonia walk in Barcelona's Gràcia neighborhood.

Barcelona’s food shops and colmados offer culinary treasures all year long, but the holidays are a particularly exciting time for browsing their wares. The festive window displays show magnificent gift baskets overflowing with tasty treats – with many Spanish and Catalan specialties among them. Perhaps the most desirable items in holiday gift baskets here are the seasonal sweets, which previous generations would amass in quantities that would serve as “emergency” treats for unexpected guests the rest of the new year. (Thankfully, one can now find these year-round, so there’s no need to hoard them.) We’ve written previously about artisanal turrón, which continues to be handmade by a few family-run companies.

Barcelona continued to thrill this year with its seemingly never-ending possibilities for great eating, from ambitious family-run eateries to neighborhood restaurants steeped in Catalan traditions to world-renowned temples of gastronomy. Granja Elena With its great gastronomic aspirations and a solid foundation in farm-to-table cooking and traditional Catalan recipes, this small Zona Franca granja (literally “farm”), which was been passed down through three generations, has gone from a simple shop serving breakfast and snacks to a full-blown restaurant and total culinary wonder. Run by the Sierra-Calvo family since 1974, Granja Elena is now helmed by the third generation, who are all industry professionals: Borja runs the kitchen, Patricia the wines and Guillermo the dining room.

At the beginning, Gelida was just a bodega where Joan Llopart i Figueres, who came from the village of Gelida in Penedés, offered Catalan wine, cold cuts and a few traditional Catalan dishes cooked by his grandmother, like butifarra amb mongetas (boiled sausage with beans). Llopart i Figueres and his wife worked here until they were in their 80s. They were succeeded by their two children, Teresa and Alberto, who have always been involved in the family business and who continue to run the place today alongside their respective spouses, Josep and Luci. Alberto and Luci’s son, Gerard, helps to manage the restaurant, and Laura and Santi, family friends who live nearby, joined the team in recent years as dining room manager and chef.

Escalivada and craterellus-yellow foot mushroom timbale alongside wine porrón are among the pleasant culinary experiences you'll encounter on our walk in the Barcelona neighborhood of Gràcia.

When people think of rice and Spain, they think of paella. In Barcelona there are hundreds of places to eat paella. And every Thursday you can find it on the menú del día at most restaurants across the city. There’s more to Spanish rice dishes than just paella, though. The word “paella” didn’t even appear until the 18th century; recipe books from the Middle Ages talk only of rice, and particularly the Valencian and Catalan kinds. In fact, “paella” originally referred to the pan used to cook the grain, but eventually came to describe the dish as we know it: rice prepared so that the water or broth completely evaporates and sometimes is left with a toasted layer on the bottom. But enough about paella!