The markets of Latin America, the belly of the trip

If you want to understand a country in Latin America, skip the first museum and walk into the nearest mercado instead. That is the rule I travel by now, and it has never once let me down. The first thing that hits you is the colour: pyramids of fruit I couldn't name on sight, chillies sorted by heat and shade, herbs in damp bundles, whole counters of corn in every yellow, white and purple the plant has ever produced. The second thing is the noise — vendors calling prices, blenders roaring, somebody frying something that smells like the best decision you'll make all day.

I've come to think of the market as the cheapest and most honest cantina a city has, and the best geography lesson too. Nothing tells you more about a place than what its people stack on a table at seven in the morning. So this is a love letter to the mercados of Mexico, Peru, Colombia and beyond — and a small, practical word about the phone that helped me read the signs in a language I only half spoke.

Mexico City: tacos al pastor and the towers of San Juan

I started in Mexico City, where the markets are practically a civic institution. La Merced is enormous, dizzying, the wholesale heart of the city; Mercado de San Juan is the gourmet cousin, where vendors preside over careful towers of produce and rare ingredients. But the lesson I keep returning to is simpler than either: find the comedor, the little kitchen counter at the back, sit on a stool at the elbow of strangers, and eat what they're eating. It's fresh, it's cheap, and it's almost always better than the restaurant you were going to look up.

The taco al pastor is the obvious king — pork shaved off a vertical spit, a sliver of pineapple, onion and cilantro, three bites of perfection — but I learned to chase the things I'd never heard of. A bowl of pozole. A plate touched with mole, that long, patient sauce of chillies and chocolate that no two cooks make the same way. And to drink, an agua fresca: jamaica, horchata, tamarind, whatever the jug holds, pressed and poured into a plastic cup with no ceremony at all.

« The comedor at the back of the market is the best table in the city — you just have to be willing to share it. »

This is where my phone quietly earned its place, and I want to be honest about how small that role is. I used it to translate a label I couldn't read, to convert pesos into something my brain understood before I overpaid out of politeness, and once to find my way back to a stall whose name I'd forgotten but whose salsa I had not. Nothing heroic — just a little data smoothing the gap between a menu and my schoolboy Spanish.

Peru: ceviche in Lima, San Pedro in Cusco

Peru turned the market into something close to obsession for me. In Lima, the Mercado de Surquillo sits a short walk from the smart restaurants of Miraflores and quietly out-cooks half of them. Ceviche here is religion — fish cured in lime, red onion, chilli, a slick of that bright, fierce leche de tigre you should absolutely drink straight from the bowl when no one's watching. Eaten at the market counter, fish that was swimming yesterday, it costs a fraction of the tasting-menu version and loses nothing but the tablecloth.

Up in Cusco, the Mercado de San Pedro is the Andes on a table. This is potato country — hundreds of varieties — and the air smells of choclo, the big-kernelled highland corn, grilled and handed over warm. The fruit stalls undid me: lúcuma with its dense, maple-caramel flesh, granadilla you crack open and slurp, the soft custard-sweetness of chirimoya. And yes, you'll see cuy — guinea pig, roasted whole — which has been an Andean food for thousands of years, long before it was anyone's pet, and is eaten here with the same matter-of-factness as a roast chicken anywhere else. I mention it plainly because it deserves to be met plainly, not as a dare.

Colombia: the plazas de mercado and the art of the arepa

Colombia gave me the plazas de mercado, those covered market halls where a whole region's harvest lands at dawn. The fruit alone is a reason to fly there — a tropical roll-call of names you'll be googling and tasting in the same breath. And everywhere, the arepa: a round of ground corn, griddled or fried, plain or split and stuffed, the kind of everyday food that tells you more about a country than any monument. Add an empanada, golden and hot from the oil, and a freshly pressed jugo from a fruit you've never seen, and you've eaten better than most tourists manage all week, for the price of a coffee back home.

One thing I'll say with feeling: come to these tables with respect, not a sense of the exotic. These are deep, living food cultures — many of them rooted in Indigenous traditions that predate the Spanish by millennia — and they are not a backdrop for your photos. Ask what something is. Learn the name and say it. Eat what's put in front of you with curiosity instead of caution. The vendors can tell the difference, and the day goes infinitely better when you arrive as a guest rather than a spectator.

What to remember

Every market I've described does the same two jobs: it feeds you better and cheaper than almost anywhere else, and it teaches you the country in a single morning — its crops, its history, its idea of a good meal. Eat at the comedor, taste the fruit you can't name, learn the dishes by their real names, and treat every counter as someone's livelihood and pride. Keep just enough data to read the signs and find your way, then get out of your own way and dig in. The ventre du voyage, the belly of the trip, is right there on the table.

— Romain, who has never taken a wrong turn that a market couldn't redeem.