El Palmar

This guide to El Palmar, the fishing village on Valencia's Albufera lagoon, opens with the redolin, the annual lottery each July that still decides which fisherman gets the best pitch on the lagoon for the year. It traces that thirteenth-century tradition through the rice fields carved out of the water from the seventeen hundreds onward, and the accidental lunchtime dish laborers built from whatever was on hand. You'll hear when someone finally wrote that dish's name down. Come at lottery time, on the second Sunday of July, to hear the tiles rattle.