In most places around the world, the food you eat every day doesn’t come from plastic in a grocery store. It is obtained from fresh food markets in your city. It may be a market building with individual stalls for specific merchants or framers selling right out of the back of their trucks in a market on the city’s central square, but it is always fresh and good. Farmers markets may be a recent concept in the United States, but everywhere else has kept the tradition alive.
Visiting a food market is a good way to understand the local diet and interact with locals. The very best food comes from the market. In Budapest’s Central Market, visiting stalls filled with local delicacies you can understand the importance of the pepper or pork to the local diet. In Provence, fresh vegetables rule the day. In Peru’s Sacred Valley, the markets are filled with corn and potatoes. We love visiting the local food market on our travels. Here are some of our favorite food markets around the world.
A little bit European and a little bit Canadian, Montreal is a city that loves good food, good art, and getting outside at every opportunity, no matter the weather. In the spirit of its French settlers, Montreal teems with joie de vivre.
Tables filled with exotic produce, deep fryers sizzling with fritters, Sicilian nonnas snaking their carts through the crowds to visit the vendors they’ve purchased from for decades. It’s just another typical morning in the Palermo markets.
Dazzling colors, canals, the wonder of half-timbered buildings that look like a perfect illustration—these are the things of Colmar, France.
We expected Palermo to be gritty, rough-around-the-edges, largely without charm or intrigue. What we found was a city with blemishes, but also with a mix of fascinating influences, amazing food, friendly people, and a cultural and religious history stretching back for millennia.
In Copenhagen, you can visit the Meatpacking District, take a spin through animated Tivoli Gardens and even visit the beach on your way to the picturesque old harbor, all in a walk that barely breaks two miles. But that’s just a fraction of the things to do in this colorful old city.
Most advice about Athens says that you can everything in this enormously historic city in one day. While that may get you the highest of the highlights, there’s more to Athens than that.
Dallas is about BBQ and cowboys—both the football kind and the calf-roping kind—but it’s so much more than that, too.
Bergen exudes so much charm and small-town feel, you’d never know it’s actually Norway’s second largest city.
It’s almost impossible to be unhappy when you’re surrounded by good food.
The energetic, historic capital of Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, Bologna is our favorite type of city. It is large enough to have lots of things to see and do but is easy to navigate and lacks the crowds that can flood some of the bigger cities.
