Bars in Spain are an interesting institution that we have written about in the blogs of previous trips. First, a “bar” is really a coffee house/social club/restaurant that happens to serve alcoholic beverages. We go into bars frequently as we walk the Camino. We always have cafe con leche (similar to the Italian cafe latte or French café au lait) but they have all manner of coffee drinks. They are pretty cheap, we usually pay 1.30 euro ($1.45) although this year they are often 1.50 euro and just today in a fancy Spanish government hotel (a parador) we paid a hefty 2.20.
There are always locals hanging around socializing. In small towns in Spain we often saw older men (presumably retired) who appear to hang out there all day, sometimes playing cards or dominoes. But just about everyone goes to the bars, young and old, children, men and women.
You can almost always get some food, like a bocadilla (sandwich) or tortilla (potato and onion omelette) but many bars are also full restaurants. You go in and it seems like any other bar but if you ask for comida (lunch) they usher you to an often large back room which is a restaurant.
There are, as far as we know, no bar franchises, each one is unique. Part of the fun of walking is going into a bar and discovering what it is like. Often there are interesting, themed decorations. You never know what you will run into. Many seem to be run by husband and wife teams. Even if they don’t have a restaurant they will often make fried eggs and toast for you, and it is almost always well-cooked and excellent.
There is a bar in almost all little towns and on just about every block in cities.
Yes, they do serve alcohol, mostly beer and wine but the Spanish are not all weird about alcohol like in the US. People bring their kids into bars and no one thinks anything about it. It is considered in bad taste to get drunk in Spain.
Bars serve a unique social function in Spain and I wish we had the same institution in the US. British pubs are similar but don’t have the same feel to me. We walked the Vía Francigena in Italy a few years ago and they had some bars but not nearly as many as we find in Spain.
The best espresso in Italy is on the autostrada. One thing that blew me away about the bars/cafes on the autostrada, besides the superb espresso, is that they serve alcohol. Duh….
Come to think of it, the restaurants on the freeways in Austria and Germany also serve beer and wine. Duh….
I have no memory of whether the Howard Johnson’s on the New Jersey Turnpike served alcohol. We used to go back and forth from Washington to New York when I was a child. Too young to have thought about this or noticed. What about you Wynette, any memory of this?
Henry, I don’t remember about Howard Johnsons in New Jersey either. That is interesting about alcohol in the roadside bars. We stopped in one on this trip (it happened to be on the Camino). I’ll go back and look at the photos we took there and see if I spot alcohol. I expect there will be.