Fiestas de San Mateo!

If you've ever heard of La Rioja, chances are its because of its wine. So what better time to make my first trip to La Rioja then during the Fiestas de San Mateo, the festival celebrating the grape harvest each fall? I live only maybe 10 miles from La Rioja so I knew I had to visit at some point this year. But it wasn´t until one of the teachers at my school mentioned Friday afternoon that we should go to Logroño (the capital of La Rioja) this weekend for the San Mateo festival that we bought our train tickets for a spur-of-the-moment perfect weekend getaway.

Official logo for San Mateo 2013

Logroño was all decked out for the festivities. Every store window we passed had bottles of wine in its display window, even this children´s clothing store. My favorite was a sheets and bedding store that had huge four-foot-tall wine glasses filled with burgundy sheets and clusters of grapes.

The streets were packed with people (everyone wearing pañuelos around their neck), balloons, street performers, break dancers, drumming groups, traditional music, marching bands, degustaciones (little booths set up around the city center selling a small portion of each dish), and of course wine.

Had to steal this picture from my roommate,
since it perfectly captures San Mateo

Pañuelo and a glass of vino tinto

Parade of gigantes

Traditional riojano instruments
(had a double-reed like an oboe)

Here´s a clip from a drumming group that was performing in the streets:



Two euros at each of the degustaciones would get you a small plate of the dish, a piece of bread, and a glass of wine. We realized that it was the food you´re paying for and not the wine when we got to one booth that had run out of food, so they gave us the wine for free! There were degustaciones of revuelto de pimientos (scrambled eggs and peppers), chuletas al sarmiento (a traditional grilled lamb they do every year in one of the main plazas for San Mateo), and chistorra (a type of sausage that La Rioja and Navarra are famous for).

Chistorra in front of the cathedral

There was also plenty to eat outside of the official degustaciones- The Casas Regionales fair had traditional food from each autonomous community, we did a cheese tasting at a cheese store in the center, and the bars were all dishing out their best pinchos and wine (at little to-go windows out onto the street). 

Degustación de queso

Pincho with jamón and mushrooms

There are some Spanish fiestas that get a lot of foreign publicity and tourists- like San Fermines or Semana Santa. San Mateo is definitely not on this list! An old man sitting near us at the Casas Regionales fair asked us, ¿De donde sois? (the fact that we were speaking English and Instagraming our paella was probably the give away that we weren´t from Logroño). He was even more confused when we answered America and Canada; he actually asked us what on earth a couple of North Americans were doing in La Rioja, trying to figure out how we even found Logroño. And he was shocked when we told him that we lived here (well, Tudela, but close enough).  (Meanwhile, his wife kept yelling at him "Que no hablan español, no te entienden," no matter how many times we told her that we speak Spanish- or castellano, as they call it here.)

It´s hard not to love La Rioja and the Fiestas de San Mateo. Good food, good wine and a beautiful location- a small but charming city on the banks of the Ebro River, surrounded by mountains and miles of vineyards. What more could you ask for?? All in all, a perfect day!