The Ebro Delta is a flat landscape of marshes, channels and lagoons, its terroir producing an aromatic, short grain rice with excellent absorption properties.
It’s not every day you get to follow a Spanish rebel into a training camp. Yet here I am in the Ebro Delta, hurling wooden clubs at imaginary targets, singing protest songs and wading through mud up to my knees.
A two-hour train trip from Barcelona brings me to the village of L’Aldea in the Tarragona province on Spain’s east coast. I’m here to learn about Ebro Delta rice, an older style that has Protected Designation of Origin Certification . It is said to produce the best paella in the country. Spending the morning with an eco-warrior is a bonus.
Now “retired”, Polet runs Delta Polet, an eco-tourism venture that offers hands-on conservation tours. “My tours are just another form of protest,” he says. I select “rice with red prawns”, which arrives in a blackened dish and is set out on its own side-table. I raise my spoon, not knowing where to start: with the saffron-infused rice that glistens like pearls? With one of the six prawns, their heads and tails artfully arranged in a perfect pinwheel? Or with the “socarrat”, that crispy, caramelised layer of scorched rice at the bottom? Simple yet complex, earthy, but with a bright essence this is hands-down the best “paella” I’ve eaten.
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