This is the best place to buy fruit I've found so far in Bilbao. Note: I have not had a lot of ability to explore and I missed the Saturday open market.
This place had more less-usual apple varieties than other places I checked, including inside Erriberako Merkatua/Mercado La Ribera.
This is in contrast to València, where the best fruit sellers I encountered were in the Mercat Central. They carried more different fruits than the average greengrocer, including loquats and Alpine strawberries.
Sadly, apple-growing (and a lot of other fruit-growing) has been homogenized. Even if it's grown locally to you, it is likely a fruit bred elsewhere. This isn't always a bad thing, but it is bad when good local varieties become almost impossible to find.
So you can find 'Gala', 'Fuji', 'Cripps Pink' aka "Pink Lady™" apples and 'Conference' pears at most greengrocers I've been to in my EU trip so far, but it's harder to find local cultivars.
Here they have a couple less common ones.
The most frustrating one for me as a home grower, is that there is a peach cultivar bred specifically for where I live, but it has been lost in Canada. You can obtain it in the US but you can no longer grow it here where it was specifically bred for in the first place. There is apparently no legal way to import even bare root.
@RobotDiver What's it called?
Yeah, biosafety laws have tightened in many many places. I wanted to re-import the carob selections that were found in California and spirited off to Australia. Couldn't afford what was needed to make it happen.
It's unlikely a Canadian consumer can get germplasm from USDA, but a Canadian researcher probably still could. Possibly a Canadian nursery willing to pay what's involve with phytosanitary certificates and quarantining, etc.
@ml We have a selection of local types in season and for a few months afterwards, then it's back to the same boring imported standards.
Looking forward to autumn and apple season..
@hallvors Good point. If the local cultivar doesn't store well, then it might be gone by March or April. I wasn't seeing any in Czechia in February, either.
Good reminder that unless it's a good keeper, it would also depend on when in the season it harvests.
I'm spoiled that my favorite less usual cultivar stores very well.
Megan Lynch (she/her)
Robot Diver 🌊🌬️🍃🌿🌸🌱🌱🌱
hallvors