Níspero de Callosa: The Loquat from the Province of Alicante
The Latin name says it's Japanese. Its home is southern China, where it has been cultivated for more than a thousand years and where more than eighty percent of the world's crop still ripens today. And its most famous European address turned out to be the terraces in the hills above the coast near Alicante.
Níspero de Callosa is the loquat (Eriobotrya japonica) grown around the small town of Callosa d'en Sarrià in the province of Alicante - an orange fruit the size of an apricot, with smooth skin, sweet juicy flesh and a few big seeds, which Spanish cooking eats fresh and peeled the moment it ripens in April. It's a fruit that has been named, every single time, by whoever saw it last.
A Name the Loquat Borrowed
The Spanish níspero is older than the tree that bears it today. The word comes from the Latin mespilum and for centuries it belonged to the medlar, the European fruit the size of a plum that you eat only once it has gone overripe and that back home in Czechia is more of a garden curiosity than something you buy in a shop. When a distant relative with bigger, sweeter fruit arrived from Asia in the nineteenth century, the Spanish simply handed the name over - and the original medlar disappeared from the markets so completely that nobody in Alicante today thinks of it when they hear the word níspero. The name traveled further still: order a níspero in Mexico and you'll get a sapodilla, a brown tropical fruit that has nothing in common with either of them but a mistake made by the conquistadors. One word now sells three different fruits.
Almost the entire Mediterranean grows it, and Spain is far from alone. The loquat is a fruit shared by the entire southern rim of Europe: in Italian cooking it is the nespola, and on Sicily it gets a festival of its own, shared with spaghetti; in Portuguese it is the nêspera, in Greek the mousmoulo, and Turkish calls it yeni dünya, the new world, or else the Maltese plum - both names point somewhere else entirely, but at least each in a different direction. Spain is one of Europe's biggest growers and roughly two thirds of its crop comes from the province of Alicante; the area around Callosa accounts for about half of all Spanish nísperos.
A Lawyer from Callosa and a Protected Origin
There are two stories about how the Chinese tree reached the terraces of Alicante. The legend that growers' websites like to repeat has a merchant captain named Roig bringing the seeds to a port on the east coast around 1821; nobody has a shred of evidence for it. What is documented instead is Juan Bautista Berenguer y Ronda, a lawyer and naturalist from Callosa who wrote about growing loquats in the first half of the nineteenth century and established them in his home region - on terraces that used to carry citrus and are still picked by hand, because no machine will climb a flight of steps. On January 14, 1992, Nísperos Callosa d'en Sarrià was granted a protected designation of origin (PDO); the area runs from two mountain valleys above Callosa down to the coast between Altea and Villajoyosa, and ninety-five percent of it is planted with a single variety, Algerie, prized for traveling well and for tasting sweet and tart at the same time.
Seeds like Chestnuts and a Fruit That Doesn't Travel
You eat a níspero out of your hand: a ripe one almost peels itself, the skin comes away in strips and what is left is orange flesh around two to five seeds. The seeds are big, brown and glossy like the horse chestnuts we used to carry home from the park in our pockets as kids - and just like horse chestnuts, they aren't eaten, because they contain a small amount of cyanogenic glycosides, so the only place for a seed is the trash. Cut flesh browns within minutes and the skin bruises if you so much as look at it; that is why the níspero spent centuries traveling no further than the nearest market, and it wasn't until refrigerated trucks arrived in the 1980s that it could cross a border. Today about seventy percent of the crop leaves Callosa, mostly for Italy and Portugal. And it flowers against the grain of the rest of the orchard: in October and November, when the other fruit trees have long gone to sleep, bees take the last honey of the year from it.
The season is short: the main harvest runs from April to the end of May, and through the whole of May Callosa d'en Sarrià puts on the Mes del Níspero, a month when the town's restaurants and shops offer everything that can be made from the fruit. Out of season, you're left with jam and nísperos en almíbar, in syrup. At the market you don't judge ripeness by eye but with a fingernail: the skin of a ripe fruit comes off without a knife, and one that clings should have stayed on the tree a while longer.
A Pile at the Market in Alicante
I bought my nísperos at an open-air market in Alicante, off a pile under a sign written in marker. I decided not to look too closely at the quotation marks around the name - either the seller was honest, or a little too honest. I ate them on a pier in the harbor among the yachts. The flesh was juicy and soft, the taste sweet and delicate, somewhere between a peach, an apricot and a plum, and the seeds took up a good third of each fruit. A kilo cost 2.50 EUR.
