The history of paella: from the Albufera to Barcelona
The oldest document describing anything close to paella as we know it dates to the late 18th century. A recipe manuscript from the early 1700s already distinguishes between a soupy rice "a la catalana" and a drier one "a la valenciana," and in 1760 an Italian traveler named Giuseppe Baretti wrote home describing a "Valencian rice" he'd eaten at a friend's house in Spain [1]. Before that, there are traces — rice cultivation in the area was already well established — but no dish going by that name. Everything points to the same place: the rice paddies ringing the Albufera, the freshwater lagoon just south of the city of Valencia.
Marcela Escandell, CC BY-SA 3.0 ES
Why the Albufera, specifically
Rice reached the Iberian Peninsula through Arab agriculture, which from the 10th century onward improved on Roman irrigation systems and found the marshy land around the Albufera — then known as "Al Buhera" — ideal for growing it [2]. It wasn't a fast process. Some records mention coarse, unhusked rice in the area as early as the 16th century, but the first clear references to a dish recognizable as paella don't show up until well into the 18th [1][3].
What emerged was a dish born of necessity, not luxury. Farmers and shepherds in the area cooked with whatever they had: rice, rabbit, chicken, vegetables from the nearby fields, and — where the land allowed it — eel or marsh rat [3]. No seafood at all, that came later with the coastal variants, and nothing that didn't grow or run on that specific patch of land.
The same area still grows the rice used in traditional paella today. The Denominación de Origen Arroz de Valencia, set up to protect the senia, bomba and bahía varieties, certifies close to 17,500 hectares of cultivation spread across the Albufera and other Valencian wetlands — a figure that stays essentially flat, because the crop only works on marshland [4][2].
Where the name actually comes from
Paella isn't the name of an invented recipe — it's the name of the pan it's cooked in. The word comes from the Valencian "paella," meaning "pan," which in turn traces back to the Latin "patella," a diminutive of "patina" (a wide, flat dish) [1][3]. The same Latin root gives us the Italian "padella," the French "poêle," and the old Spanish "padilla." In Spanish, over time, "paella" came to mean mostly the dish itself, while "paellera" was reserved for the pan — a usage originally considered incorrect but eventually accepted into the dictionary anyway [3]. Here, we still use "paella" for both, following the original Valencian convention (see our terminology note above).
How it got out of Valencia
The first published recipe actually called "paella" appeared in 1857, in a French-and-Spanish cookbook by M. Garciarena and Mariano Muñoz [3]. Four decades later, in 1896, the Valencian author Víctor Navarro catalogued 24 different ways of making it, and that same year the French filmmaker Eugène Lix shot the first known footage of someone cooking one in Valencia [3]. By the early 20th century the dish was already traveling: it turned up on menus in Paris and London's Soho, and in New York, Delmonico's served a version under the name "arroz con pollo" that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was reportedly fond of [3].
But the real turning point was tourism. In August 1964, Spain's Ministry of Information and Tourism issued a ministerial order requiring every restaurant to offer a fixed daily menu, and it specifically recommended including "paella, cocido madrileño, Spanish tortilla [...] which are served abroad with great success" [3]. Tourists arriving on the Spanish coast tried the dish and created demand that spread across the whole country — Barcelona included.
Paella in Barcelona: its own story, not a copy
Barcelona has its own chapter in this story, and it doesn't start with the 1960s tourism boom. In the late 19th century, a Barcelona dandy named Juli Maria Parellada was a regular at Café Suís, on the Rambla. Tired of ordering the same thing, he asked the waiter one day for a rice dish with every ingredient fully cleaned — shrimp peeled, meat off the bone, fish without a single bone left in it. The dish caught on at the café itself and was soon picked up by other restaurants in the city, including Set Portes, under the name "arròs Parellada" [5]. Technically it's a Catalan creation, a close cousin of mixed paella rather than the same dish, and it's still on menus in the city today.
That's the real relationship between Barcelona and paella: not a local dish dressed up as Valencian, but a city that had already been folding rice into its own cooking for more than a century before tourism finished popularizing the original recipe across Spain. Keeping those two things separate — the documented Valencian origin, and Barcelona's own, very real relationship with rice — feels more honest to us than flattening it into one tidy story.
When we cook paella with people in the workshop here in El Raval, we're not trying to rewrite where the dish comes from. We follow the technique and respect for the product that this history documents — sofrito, rice, broth, socarrat — and we explain that background to anyone who asks, because understanding where something comes from is part of understanding what you're cooking. If you want to go deeper into the technique itself, we've written a step-by-step piece on the process; and if you'd rather experience it directly, you can book a spot in the paella cooking class in Barcelona.
Sources cited
Visit València (Fundació Visit València / Ayuntamiento de Valencia), "Discover the authentic Valencian paella", accessed 20/08/2026.
Consejo Regulador de la Denominación de Origen Arroz de Valencia, "Historia del cultivo del arroz", accessed 20/08/2026.
Wikipedia, "Paella", accessed 20/08/2026 (citing Lujan, Davidson, Dionisio Pérez and other primary academic sources).
Wikipedia, "Arroz de Valencia", accessed 20/08/2026.
Wikipedia, "Arroz Parellada", accessed 20/08/2026 (citing Jaume Fàbrega, El gust d'un poble, 2002; Teresa-M. Sala, La vida cotidiana en la Barcelona de 1900, 2005; Colman Andrews, Catalan Cuisine, 1999).
Transparency note: the exact origin date of paella (15th-16th century according to some sources, documented with certainty only from the 18th) is still debated among food historians, as the cited Wikipedia article itself notes. This piece reflects that uncertainty rather than settling on a single unverifiable date.