Food Tours · Tour

Seven Pintxos and the Gilda That Started Them All

The operator has been running pintxo tours here since 2005, before most of the current bars existed, and the format shows it: seats are reserved for the group at every stop, so you eat sitting down while the counter beside you is three deep. Seven premium pintxos, five drinks and a sweet dessert across three hours, with ten guests at most. One of the seven is the gilda, and it is included deliberately. An olive, an anchovy and a pickled guindilla pepper threaded on a stick over good extra virgin olive oil, invented in a bar here in the 1940s and named after the Rita Hayworth film because it was green, salty and a bit spicy. Everything else on a pintxo counter descends from that idea. The drinks are chosen rather than default: Spanish reds and whites including Rioja, local cider, beer, and txakoli, the sharp Basque white poured from a height. Water comes as a courtesy. The walking covers the Plaza de la Constitución with its numbered balconies, Calle 31 de Agosto, the one street that survived the 1813 fire and now holds the densest run of bars in the city, and the Baroque front of the Basílica de Santa María del Coro at the top of it. There is a lunch version with six pintxos, four drinks and a dessert. Guided in English or Spanish. Wheelchair accessible throughout, which almost no pintxo tour here can claim. Flexible for preferences and allergies.