Everyday shopping in Spain

It’s been 4 months since we packed up our home and moved out of Austin, 3 months since we settled down in Tres Cantos, and our furniture and things are ABOUT TO ARRIVE! Next week! Yipee!!

So, I probably won’t have a post for next week, as we unwrap and unpack for hours on end. I’m guessing that we will be surprised by some of the things we find in the move since I packed about 60 boxes back at the end of 2019, when we first decided we were going to sell our home and move to Spain, before Covid…

Ah, well.

In today’s blog I wanted to talk about shopping in Spain. For starters, I’m living in a small city (approx.. 45,000 people) and so my experience is different than if I were in a rural village or a larger city (though I’m pretty close to Madrid, so that can skew things slightly.) But still, I think my experience with stores is pretty typical for what you could expect in most places in Spain.

Since the Spanish, as do most Europeans, tend to live in more densely packed urban areas, (even when in smaller cities) it’s easier to have a lot of shops within walking distance from your home. I took this video below about a 5 minute walk away from my home, and you can see that there are quite a few shops to choose from, right there.

But let’s dive a little deeper. One of you (shout out to Marilyn!) asked me to describe what grocery stores are like. Are they the huge Walmart experiences? Well, some are, some aren’t.

Within a 10-minute walk from my front door, I have 2 grocery stores, and if I wanted to go a bit further, I’d have several more. The larger one is actually very similar to a neighborhood Walmart (it’s run by a French company) and you can find small appliances, phones & computers, housewares, clothing, books and all the usual grocery store fare. It’s laid out in wide aisles, and there’s a lot of choice. What’s more, it’s located in a mall, so there are also restaurants, (including a frozen yoghurt shop) movie theaters, and a host of apparel chain stores.

The “small” grocery store, in the opposite direction, is not that small. The pictures below are taken in that store (albeit furtively since I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to take pictures inside!) You can see the fruit and veggie section has quite a variety, but not refrigerated, for the most part. This is because they are really fresh. (There is a cabinet behind the 4 isles of produce with refrigerated fruits and vegetables like salad fixings, peeled veggies, etc.)

In Texas, especially in Houston, we had a terrific choice of fruits and veggies. Spain also offers a great choice, but since there are a lot of fruit shops, some supermarkets don’t have a very big selection. There are some things I consistently find better in one store (great bananas, for example) and a different thing, like lettuce, much better in a different store.

What changes is the variety in certain products.  For example, since the Spanish love their olive oil, the choices of brands of oil are astounding. I couldn’t even get all of them in the lens of my camera.

Same goes for types of jamon, the cured ham, and other cured meats.

Breakfast cereals are not as widely eaten here, so the choices are fewer, though my husband has found several that he likes. (As I mentioned in my blog post about Spanish breakfasts, I prefer the fresh-baked bread for breakfast.)

There are also quite a few choices of milk (both nut “milk” and cow’s milk) though they are mostly sold unrefrigerated, in these vacuum-packed cartons (that must be refrigerated once opened but are convenient to store in a pantry until use.)

One difference from when I lived here more than 20 years ago, is the variety of prepared foods now available. Everything from typical Spanish foods like the tortilla de patatas (Spanish potato omelet) to croquetas are widely available. And foods like pizzas, chicken tenders and frozen, ready-to-bake veggies are on display.

There are also quite a few vegan options. We tried vegan burgers made of eggplant the other day and they were wonderful!

An interesting experience, which happens when I go to any new store, even in the US, has been figuring out where in the store to look for things. Peanut butter, for example, is available, but don’t look near the jellies and jams to find it.

Between the two grocery stores and a few other specialty shops, I have found pretty much everything I’ve wanted, including the brand of lotion, shampoo and toothpaste that we used in Texas.

One new grocery store vocabulary word for me this time around is the word for “organic”, which is “Bio”.

What can we not find in Spain that we miss from Texas? (Thank you to my friend, Pat for the question!) Hmmm. My husband might say what he misses from our local Austin grocery store, HEB, was their brand of dental floss. We get the Oral-B floss here, but there’s something about the HEB one that he really liked.

What I miss is the variety of cake mixes. There are a few here, and maybe they’re good–I haven’t tried them since my pans have not yet arrived from the move. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t say, though, that you CAN actually get these cake mixes on our good ol’ friend, the Amazon website, but a standard Betty Crocker devil’s food cake mix box costs about $11!  Not happening! I think I’ll just have to “make do” with the Spanish sweets I can find here. It’s rough, but someone’s gotta do it!)

So that’s groceries, but what about other things? There is IKEA for furniture and housewares, as well as several other furniture stores, though none I had ever heard of. There are electronics stores and a huge outlet mall in the next town over for miles of shopping under one roof.

Closer to home, for apparel , there are lots of boutique stores as well as bigger box stores in the mall. There are also lots of small specialty stores for hair and skin products, or pet products, or produce.

And then there are “estancos” which really have no equivalent in the US, that I know of.

When I first got here thirty-five years ago and saw the “tabacos” sign, I quickly decided that that was one store I’d never feel compelled to visit. But I was wrong! As government-sanctioned stores, estancos used to be the only place you could buy cigarettes, but they are also the only place to buy bus passes. You can also find stamps (these are only sold here and in post offices), nice pens, gifts, and a whole host of odds and ends.

And speaking of odds and ends, there is a type of shop called a “bazar” (pronounce it like a Spaniard, bah-THAHR) or “hiper bazar” which are the Spanish equivalent of Dollar Stores. In these sometimes ramshackle, sometimes surprisingly upscale shops, you can find all manner of things from practical to outlandish, some darn near junk but others quite good. Many are plastic items, which is discouraging, but there are also ceramic and glass wares, all sorts o things for the home, craft materials, party decorations and even junk food.   

What about you? What do you think you’d miss if you chose to live abroad?

And as always, please check out (and tell someone about) my novels here.