Why people travel for hours to buy bread in a tiny Basque village

Drive in from 10 or 15 kilometres out and all you see around Elciego are vineyards faded by autumn. Yet the drivers heading into this village of fewer than 1,000 people in Rioja Alavesa (the wine country of Álava, in Spain's Basque Country) aren't only after wine. Some travel for hours, even after several flights, to taste what many call one of the best breads and puff pastries in Spain.

What happened? 🥐

The bakery is called Barrihuelo. It has collected almost every award in the trade and is now preparing a second shop in Logroño. Just 10 people work there, including the founding couple.

The turning point was a video with more than nine million views. "Living this boom on social media is like winning the lottery," says co-founder Georgina Reinares. At weekends the queue fills the entire street.

The new shop, which she hopes to open in January or February, will sell only bread, leaving the Elciego shop for pastries. They are already hunting for staff, because the team needs to double.

Why is everyone talking about it?

Locals simply call it "the social media bread". On a Thursday in early November, restaurants give staff a break between breakfast and lunch, because they know midday is the bakery's rush. Residents don't even let strangers finish the question: "The bakery is round the other corner."

Inside, about twenty kinds of sweets, mostly laminated pastry, compete with steaming loaves on the shelves. The shop assistant keeps telling customers not to close the bag too tightly, so the steam can escape.

Sergio Andrés Cabello, a sociologist at the University of La Rioja, lists what helps: a good product, good road links and access to the tourist market, which in Elciego comes from winery visitors. He adds that the village now has to make the most of those queues.

It's not just Elciego

The same thing is happening elsewhere. In Bustos, an Asturian hamlet of just 224 people, the pastry shop Cabo Bustos has more than 70,000 followers on Facebook and Instagram. Pastry chefs from Colombia spend months there training.

In Trives, Ourense (fewer than 2,000 residents), chef Anxo Fernández runs the hostel-restaurant La Viuda. He says the 39 rooms are always full and he supports a staff of 15. "My only option is to use social media marketing to survive," he says.