Valencia Street Food: Bunyols (Pumpkin Fritters) and Where to Find Them

Bunyols are Valencia's traditional street food — fried pumpkin fritters dusted in sugar. Here's when to find them, where to eat them, and what else to eat on the street.

Valencia Street Food: Bunyols, Fritters, and What to Eat on the Go

The Street Food That Belongs to the City

Valencia doesn't have the street food culture of Southeast Asian cities or the hawker tradition of the Middle East. What it does have is a handful of regional foods that exist almost nowhere else — foods tied to seasons, festivals, and local ingredients — and the best of these is the bunyol.

A bunyol (plural: bunyols) is a fried fritter made with pumpkin. That's the Valencia version, anyway. Flour, eggs, pumpkin, a little sugar — mixed into a loose dough, dropped by spoonfuls into hot oil, fried until golden, dusted in sugar, eaten immediately.

They are hot, crispy on the outside, soft in the middle, and faintly sweet. They cost almost nothing. They are genuinely one of the better things you can eat in this city.