Sagunto's markets, with 22 empty stalls, look for visitors with a neighbourhood cookbook
With 11 empty stalls at each municipal market, Sagunto City Council is presenting a cookbook put together by local traders this Saturday in Sagunto and on 3 October in Puerto de Sagunto.
Sagunto's two municipal markets are carrying a notable number of empty stalls this year: 11 of the 40 stalls at Sagunto's indoor market and 11 of the 47 at Puerto de Sagunto's indoor market currently have no trader, according to the local trade portal. That amounts to almost a quarter of the stalls at Sagunto's market and just over a fifth of those in Puerto de Sagunto. Against that backdrop, the City Council is trying to draw people to both venues this weekend and the next with the presentation of a cookbook put together with contributions from the traders themselves.
The event will be held twice, a week apart: on Saturday 26 September at Sagunto's indoor market, on Plaza Cronista Chabret (a square in central Sagunto), and on Saturday 3 October at Puerto de Sagunto's indoor market (coastal district), on Plaza del Sol (a square by the seafront market). At both events, the Trade and Markets Department (Concejalía de Comercio y Mercados) will present the publication 'Recetario del Comercio Local: el sabor de tu barrio' (Local Trade Cookbook: the flavour of your neighbourhood), part of the municipal 'Recetas al mercado' (Recipes for the market) campaign included in the department's annual programme.
The cookbook did not come out of nowhere: over recent months, food shops signed up to the campaign placed collection boxes where customers and residents could drop off their recipes. From the material gathered, the department made a selection and put together the final publication, which brings together dishes from traders at both municipal markets.
Each presentation day will have its own programme, with separate workshops for children and for older residents, designed so both groups can share knowledge of neighbourhood cooking. There will also be tastings and live cooking demonstrations — showcooking — along with promotional gifts for the recipes that scored best during the campaign.
For Trade and Markets councillor Natalia Antonino, the goal goes beyond gathering dishes: it is about giving value to traders and the people behind each business, as a living part of the town's history. In her words, behind every recipe is a family, a shop and a neighbourhood, and bringing those stories together is a way of protecting heritage that forms part of Sagunto's collective identity.
The campaign is not a one-off: it sits within a broader Comprehensive Plan to Support Local Trade Competitiveness, co-financed with EU funds and run jointly by the City Council, the Valencian regional government (Generalitat Valenciana), the Valencia Chamber of Commerce and FACOSA (the federation of trade associations of Sagunto and Puerto). Under that umbrella, several actions have followed in recent years aimed at strengthening the municipal markets against other retail formats. The plan's action lines also include guerrilla-marketing and street-marketing initiatives — informal, attention-grabbing promotional actions in public spaces — designed to draw more foot traffic and visibility to the municipal markets.
The cookbook itself has an audiovisual forerunner: according to elperiodic.com, months earlier a short documentary, 'La Trastienda' ('The Back Room'), was released in June 2026 under the same slogan, with recipes chosen by a jury and by public vote on social media. Further back in time, in 2023, the Council had already put together and run an equivalent campaign, 'Cocina con responsabilidad' ('Cooking with Responsibility'), with sixteen workshops split evenly between the two markets — eight in Sagunto and eight in Puerto de Sagunto — running between July that year and January 2024, with showcooking sessions led by chefs Víctor Aliaga and David Raona. Antonino herself argued back then that this kind of event was a way to build customer loyalty to market shopping, as opposed to other forms of retail trade.
With this new edition, the Council is looking to keep going with a formula that combines food promotion with support for small businesses in the town's two urban centres; if the interest shown in earlier editions is repeated, it would not be surprising to see it return in future trading seasons. According to Sagunto City Council — Actualidad, with additional information from elperiodic.com and the local trade portal.