Erizos de mar, the sea urchins of Cádiz

What you are eating

The edible part is the gonad, bright orange-yellow, and the female ones are the more prized because the male gonads are grainier. The flavour is iodine and sea water, concentrated. Eating erizos was traditionally confined to a few communities in Cádiz province before it spread to the rest of Andalusia and beyond.

Along the Andalusian coast the animal is simply called erizo, so you will not meet the Asturian oricio or the Catalan garota on a Cádiz menu. It lives on rocky shore down to about 30 metres, which is why it was gathered by divers and shore pickers and not netted.

Why the menu may not have them

An order of 17 October 2023 closed the erizo fishery along the whole Andalusian coast, citing the critical state of its populations, and suspended the diving licences until a new order reopens it. The June 2023 population report behind it found no exploitable stock at all in Cádiz province. Two causes are named: the rising pressure from a taste that had spread beyond Cádiz, and the invasive alga Rugulopteryx okamurae, detected in the Strait of Gibraltar in 2015, which is overgrowing the rocky bottoms the urchins live on.

The traditional rules had been a closed season from 1 May to 31 October and a minimum size of 45 mm. Those mean nothing while the fishery is shut. Whether it has reopened is a question for the Junta de Andalucía's official bulletin (BOJA) and its fisheries department, not for this page.

• Do not plan a meal around erizos; treat one on a menu as a bonus.
• Ask the bar where the urchins came from and when they were opened.
• Skip any plate that has clearly sat out; an opened urchin does not improve.

The Erizada in La Viña

The one occasion built around the animal is the Erizada Popular, the oldest of the Carnival food festivals and held in La Viña, the fishermen's quarter. Neighbourhood peñas hand out urchins opened on the spot while street groups sing, and the bars add fried fish and white wine, in the company of the pestiñada, the ostionada and the mejillonada. It sits in the weeks before Carnival, and the guide to the Carnival is the place for the wider calendar.

Dates, locations and what is handed out can change from one year to the next, so check the official Carnival programme before you go, and ask whether urchins are actually being served that year.

How they are opened and eaten

At home the method is simple. Hold the urchin in a cloth, clip off the spines, cut an opening around the mouth, and eat the gonads with a small spoon. Cooks who want them warm lift the gonads out like segments of a mandarin and gratinate them, scramble them with eggs or fold them into a seafood sauce at the last moment.

In a bar, ask for them raw with lemon. A glass of cold manzanilla suits the salt, and ostiones are the natural second order if the urchins are off the list.