Andalucia, Spain is not somewhere that you hear much about as a North American traveler.  You hear of Barcelona.  You hear of Mardrid.  But you don’t hear much about the beautiful, hidden gem, Andalucia.

This region of Southern Spain, with it’s more popular towns being Seville, Granada and Marbella is hot-hot-hot!  It’s close proximity to North Africa means it gets some of that warm Saharan air coming in.  I was nearly tempted to buy one of the hand-held fans being sold on the streets; and this was in May.

Before we headed on our Southern Spain adventure, we happened to catch a travel show on this region.  What sparked my attention was the claim of free food being readily available.  All you had to do was drink.  I could do that.

According to the show, in places like Granada, if you ordered drinks, the tapas were free.  New drink= new tapas.  I would have to investigate this first hand!

I knew the pace of life slowed down in Spain, but it seemed like the further south you went, the more relaxed things got too.

It can be challenging falling into this pace of life when you have two mini-travelers along for the ride.  Not because it’s not baby friendly-it is, but because your kids might starve to death if you try and wait until the appropriate Spanish time to eat.

In Andalucia, restaurants don’t open for lunch until 1:00pm.  Get ready for a mid-day feast because that’s how they do it deep in the south of Spain.  The main meal of the day is usually in the middle of the afternoon.  Restaurants are empty at 1:00pm, when they open, but packed with locals ready to eat by 3pm.

After the lunch time feast, everything shuts down for siesta time, and restaurants open up again for dinner at 8pm, once again, usually filling up with locals several hours later.

So what’s a Franco-Canadian family to do when bedtime comes before the restaurants are even open.  How was I supposed to test out my free food theory?

After wiggling around nap times and with the help of the cobblestone roads jiggling our little ones to sleep in their strollers, my tapas testing was on it’s way.

A big lunch, followed by long sightseeing walks left us with two sleeping babies in strollers that we happily parked beside us in a beautiful Spanish square where we quenched our thirst with sangria while listening to Flamenco music in the distance.

The sangria was just wetting our whistles, and as if on cue, the tapas arrived moments later: bread with some kind of seafood potato salad combo on top.  That was round one.  Our travel show was right.  If we stayed to drink they kept the food coming.  But at the risk of getting day-drunk and having no one to take care of our children, the experiment was shorter lived than I would have liked.

So I’ll live vicariously through you.  If you find yourself in the beautiful Andalucia region of Spain, and you have the freedom of staying out until crazy times like 11pm.  Let me know; just how long does the free food last?