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Alright, it might not sound the most appetising festival in the world but snails can actually be good. Just to confirm its not an exclusively French dish, the Catalan town of Lleida welcomes around 10,000 visitors to what must surely be the biggest snail fest in the world. Between 20-22 May, the annual Aplec del Caragol in the Camps Elisis gardens takes place as it has for the past 25 years dishing out 12 tonnes of the mollusc in some delicious Lleidan sauces. If the snails don’t appeal, there’s plenty of drinking going on although like in the Feria de Seville, many of the peñas (groups/gatherings) are private and so you’ll need to enamor yourself with the locals who will only be more than willing to welcome foreigners into their various celebrations. If not, all the restuarants in the region feature specialist snail dishes during the festival and it gives you a good excuse to get out into the spectacular Catalan countryside.

The fantatastic snail festival website is here: http://www.missatges.com/aplec

To get your tastes buds going, you’ll find some weird and wonderful snail recipes here: http://frenchfood.about.com/food/frenchfood/library/weekly/aa081798.htm

To get the best out of Lleida, visit the Tourist Office: http://turisme.paeria.es/index.nou.asp

For some inspirational photos of the countryside surrounding Lleida check: http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Europe/Spain/Catalonia/Lleida

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 28th, 2006 at 7:04 pm and is filed under Catalan Pyrenees. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.