Mercado El Carmen

This guide to Mercado El Carmen in Málaga opens with a puzzle: how a market can call itself over a hundred forty years old when the building around you looks brand new. It roots the answer in El Perchel, the low riverside district at the mouth of the Guadalmedina, and in the night of September 1907 when the river burst its banks upstream without a drop of rain falling on the city itself. You'll hear how high the water reportedly rose through these streets and what it did to the neighborhood and its bridges. The stalls today still trade on that same floodplain ground.