El Palo

This guide to El Palo in Málaga digs into the tidy legend behind the sardine espeto, the fish skewered on cane and grilled over open sand fires, said to have been invented in eighteen eighty-two by a beach-bar owner nicknamed Sardina Migué. It weighs that origin story against what El Palo's fishermen were already doing generations earlier, and follows a matching royal anecdote involving King Alfonso the Twelfth and a knife and fork, retold with slightly different words each time it is passed on. The same beach fires still burn on the sand today, long after the story around them was polished.