Women Who Travel Podcast: Eva Longoria on Eating Her Way Around Spain

Condé Nast Traveler

a day ago

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In 2023, Eva Longoria headed to Mexico with CNN in search of a deeper understanding of the country's rich culinary heritage and her own family history. Last month, she returned to our screens with a brand new season, Searching for Spain, which takes her all over the country to explore the vast regional scope of its cuisine and learn about her Spanish ancestors. Lale sits down with the actor and television host to find out how she chose the destinations for each episode, her most memorable meals in places like San Sebastián and Andalusia, and how food can be an entry point to connecting more deeply with history—and each other.
Lale Arikoglu: Hi there. I'm Lale Arikoglu and welcome to an episode of Women Who Travel, where we are traveling around Spain with Eva Longoria. Eva's new CNN show, Searching for Spain, is a follow-up to her series, Searching for Mexico, which ran in 2023.
Eva Longoria: So I didn't know Spain as well, and so the difference is like Mexico, I felt like I was at home. Spain really felt like a fish out of water and I was really curious and engaged in the history of gastronomy in the country, but also the history of the ingredients and how things ended up there and colonization and how did that help, and Franco's dictatorship and how did that have an effect on food. But I do live part-time in Spain. I live in Marbella in the South, so unfamiliar with the south, but everything else, I was just visited very, very superficially. And so to go to Spain in this way, with the show, really dig in deeply was a gift.
With the CNN research team, they really look at food stories. I mean, that's what drives this series is like, is there a food story there? So sometimes there'll be regions that are very popular, but there's no food story. So that's kind of the lens in which we look at each region and there's obvious cities and regions. We went to Madrid being its own episode and Catalonia being its own episode, Pais Vasco, the Basque Country being its own. And then after that, just trying to find the stories and the history and what would be visually beautiful, what people and chefs we wanted to follow.
What was daunting was speaking Castilian Spanish, because I didn't grow up speaking Spanish. I spoke Spanish in the Mexico series because I'm Mexican, but to go to the mother country of Spain and to speak Castellano, which is very different than Mexican Spanish, that was daunting. So I was like, oh God, I hope I'm going to be able to understand and communicate because when you speak the language, you really can ask the right questions and absorb the answers. And so that's what was terrifying, but it was great. I did well.