🇪🇸 Spain · El Burgo, Sierra de las Nieves, Malaga (Andalusia)
Sopa de los siete ramalesAndalusian vegetable soup
A farmhand soup of El Burgo whose name refers to seven main ingredients: tomato, pepper, onion, garlic, bread, potato and wild asparagus (some versions add mint and egg).
Origin and history
A dish of El Burgo, in the Sierra de las Nieves of Málaga, born as the meal of farmhands and day labourers in the mountain cortijos, made from day-old bread, olive oil and what the fields and hedgerows gave. The village has celebrated it every 28 February, Andalusia Day, with a festival where volunteers cook it and serve it free; Málaga's provincial council declared the festival of provincial tourist singularity in 2001.
Make it at home
- Makes
- 4 to 6 servings
- Total time
- 45 min
- Hands-on
- 40 min
Ingredients
- 500 g1.1 lb pan cateto (dense country bread), one or two days old, crust on
- 5 garlic cloves, 1 halved, the rest sliced
- 1 bunch (about 250 g)1 bunch (about 9 oz) espárragos trigueros (thin wild or green asparagus), tender parts only, chopped
- 1 large potato, peeled and cut in thin slices or small cubes
- 1 large onion, finely chopped
- 2 green peppers (Italian frying type), finely chopped
- 2 ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped
- 120 ml1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil, plus a little to finish
- 500–700 ml2–3 cups water, the amount depends on how thirsty the bread is
- 4–6 eggs, one per person
- 1 sprig (optional) hierbabuena (spearmint)
- salt, to taste
Method
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1. Rub the inside of a wide wooden bowl (dornillo) or a deep serving dish with the cut garlic clove.
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2. Tear the bread by hand into small pieces, without a knife, and put it in the bowl.
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3. In a frying pan, warm a few tablespoons of the oil and fry the asparagus with half the sliced garlic over medium heat for 6–8 minutes, until tender; set aside.
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4. In the same pan, with a little more oil, fry the potato until golden and soft, about 10 minutes; set aside.
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5. Add the rest of the oil and fry the onion, the peppers and the remaining garlic over low heat for about 10 minutes, until soft.
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6. Add the tomato and a pinch of salt and cook for 10 minutes more, until it has collapsed into a thick sofrito.
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7. Bring the water to the boil with a good pinch of salt.
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8. Pour the boiling water over the bread a ladleful at a time, turning it with a wooden spoon, until the bread is soaked through but not swimming; it should be moist, not a liquid soup.
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9. Spoon the sofrito, the asparagus and the potato over the bread and fold everything together gently; tuck in the mint sprig, if using.
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10. Fry the eggs in hot olive oil and lay them on top of the sopa.
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11. Bring the bowl to the table and serve at once.
Notes
- The name is usually explained by its seven main ingredients (bread, tomato, pepper, onion, garlic, asparagus and potato in the El Burgo tourist literature; some local cooks count the egg instead of the potato).
- Mint divides cooks: some in El Burgo consider it foreign to the original, others always add a sprig. With mint, the sopa comes close to the sopas perotas of Álora.
- Tradition is to eat it all from the same dornillo with wooden spoons, each person taking a spoonful and stepping back ('cuchará y paso atrás'). A little sopa is often left at the end and turned into 'sopeao' with raw olive oil, salt and perhaps another fried egg, mopped up with bread.
- It is eaten with oranges, grapes or olives on the side.
- Some cooks boil the asparagus before adding them to the sofrito, or use a light vegetable or chicken broth instead of water; the potato is sometimes left out.
- Outside Andalusia, replace wild asparagus with thin green asparagus, and pan cateto with a dense, open-crumbed country loaf; soft sandwich bread turns to mush.
- Many villages of inland Málaga have their own bread sopas of the same family: sopa mondeña (Monda), sopa tolita (Tolox), sopa aplastá (Pizarra) and sopas perotas (Álora).
Adapted from Ayuntamiento de El Burgo, in Recetas de la Biosfera (Ministerio de Agricultura, Alimentación y Medio Ambiente, Parques Nacionales), via Diario de Gastronomía, Cocinar sin miedo: Sopa de los siete ramales (El Burgo, Málaga), and Cocina Andaluza: Sopa de los Siete Ramales de El Burgo.
At the festivals
Served at 1 festival in Spain.
Earlier editions
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February 28, 2026
🇪🇸 El Burgo, Spain
Fiesta de la Sopa de los Siete Ramales
By volunteers of El Burgo and El Burgo (the village)