Illustration by Anna Webb (@annawebbart)
In a petite and thin glass, start off with some condensed milk. Around 40ml will do – though some recipes will simply call for a ‘dedito’, but the width of your finger. Allow a splash of Licor 43, a vanilla liqueur infused with herbs, spices, and citrus, to fall suspended over the base (ensure that it does not intermix!). To do this, you must let the liquid run off the convex side of a teaspoon, holding it gently but firmly to the wall of the glass. Repeat with a shot of espresso, again so that the two layers do not intermingle. Then, warm a glass of regular milk, and foam with whatever means at your disposal. Pour over the coffee, yet again mediating its flow with the spoon. To ensure delicacy at the end, add the final touch: a sprinkling of cinnamon, a couple flakes of lemon rind. The ingredients must rest upon each other in perfect, dissonant harmony.
The barraquito is a Canarian speciality, native to the island of Tenerife. Perhaps you’ve tried it before, in a beachside bar on the Playa de las Americas, or on a faux-marble balcony in one of Puerto de la Cruz’s hotels: its interrogating sweetness packs a punch, and the alcoholic flourish makes the eyes water. But the barraquito wasn’t dreamed up as another weapon in TUI’s all-inclusive arsenal. Its origins lie in a time where most tourist hotspots were still rickety fishing villages, and Spain a country more well-known for military dictatorship and mass-emigration than features on A Place In The Sun. To know the barraquito, one must travel to Santa Cruz de Tenerife: the capital of the island, and one of the twin municipal cities of the archipelago (tied with Las Palmas in neighbouring Gran Canaria). The city sits in the shadow of the northern mountains, a branch reaching eastwards towards Africa: a port city, it is historically known as the site where Captain Nelson, in an attempt to take the island, famously lost his arm. Nowadays, the warring fleets have been replaced by cruise ships and inter-island ferries. Their morning bellows betray a kitsch sublime.
"While Spaniards (like many Mediterraneans) have an intimate relationship with coffee, it’s only here in the Canary Islands that you’ll find the barraquito."
Legend has it, at some point in Spain’s murky mid-twentieth century, a man nicknamed ‘Barroco’ entered the Bar Imperial, one of the many cavernous drinking establishments of Santa Cruz, and ordered a cortado with Licor 43. And voilá – what would eventually become the barraquito (a diminutive of ‘Barroco’) was born. Others situate the story at another emblematic bar, Los Paragüitas, or even suggest that it was British sailors, arriving in the 19th Century, who first created the recipe. A less-romantic version of the story even suggests that it was not ‘Barroco’ that invented the drink but a waiter named Manolo Grijalbo, at a kiosco closer to the port. Variations include the zaperoco (boasting a little more liqueur) and the leche y leche (literally, ‘milk and milk’, the non-alcoholic version). It tends to be consumed in the late morning, over a newspaper or cigarettes in one of Santa Cruz’s many leafy squares, or as part of the post-lunch sobremesa (where dining parties will engage in long conversation, often for hours). There is life in this city. And a firm regional pride. Alongside the typical Spanish offerings of tortilla de patatas (a potato omelette often served with onion and ham) and croquetas, menus boast local fish, seared octopus, and papas arrugadas – baked potatoes, plastered in enough salt to crack your tongue open, served with red and green mojo sauce. And while Spaniards (like many Mediterraneans) have an intimate relationship with coffee, it’s only here in the Canary Islands that you’ll find the barraquito. Teeming with life, invigoratingly contradictory: just like the city that birthed it. Crumbling colonial buildings yawn under the weight of a rubble that could fall at any moment – ready to be intercepted by the nets flung over their disintegrating facades. Behind them, concrete apartment blocks – another cruel trick of the 1980’s – sit sternly; small pockets of light reveal old women, their hair stiffly done, watching their opposite neighbours hang out Messi shirts and floral work blouses. Schoolboys in tracksuits smoke on street corners, laughing at the flecks of ash that spit, hot like gold dust, out from their mouths. Above a dim-lit canteen (its balding, beer-bellied patrons let out a collective cry at the football), a speaker balances from an unknown window pane, blazing the dulcet tones of Bad Bunny and Puerto Rican trap. A beat-up car zips past, shocking the cacophony with classic Colombian salsa and Dominican bachata. Teenage girls pass by in weekend packs, giggling in Arabic, as Senegalese street-sellers offer patterned knick-knacks to the red-faced English couple who’ve just arrived for their holidays. A young man in dreadlocks plays 1980s madrileño rock from his flat on the fifth floor, his guitar pressed to his thighs in a lover’s embrace.
"It tends to be consumed in the late morning, over a newspaper or cigarettes in one of Santa Cruz’s many leafy squares, or as part of the post-lunch sobremesa..."
The island contradicts itself. This surface is a glossy one, most often seen behind pristine package holidays and your friend from secondary school’s Instagram feed. Yet that same glistening ocean that sparkles on a TUI brochure is where my aunt, escaping the city, slips into the water to celebrate the passing of the new year. El Teide’s Mars-like landscape, now flecked with rental cars and tour buses, are where the 1960’s middle class bathed stupidly under the ultra-intense sun – where, in the red rush of the civil war, mouths still whisper of Republican dissidents taken up to the shuddering caldera in Francoist executions. The island is no stranger to flux – it knows contradiction like the back of its red-spined hands. Black sand bleeds through the foaming sea-edge, infiltrated by curling toes, paint-peeled buckets and spades. Life shudders in absurdities and simultaneities, over and over again. Sweet and bitter.