Tap de Cortí. Mallorca's Vanishing Paprika and the People Fighting to Save It

Every August, the stone houses of Sant Jordi, Santa Maria del Camí, and Pòrtol change colour. Curtains of brilliant red appear on the facades: thousands of peppers strung together and hung to dry in the Mediterranean sun. It's a sight that has repeated itself in these villages for nearly five centuries.

What looks decorative is actually an act of survival. Those red curtains are Tap de Cortí, a native Mallorcan spice and one of Spain's most distinctive and least-known paprikas, and not long ago they were almost gone for good. The people who saved this spice understood something simple: if Tap de Cortí disappeared, something essential about Mallorcan food would disappear with it.

If you've ever tasted real Mallorcan sobrasada, that soft spreadable cured sausage with the deep red colour and creamy, slightly sweet character, you've already experienced what Tap de Cortí tastes like. You probably just didn't know its name.

What is Tap de Cortí?

Tap de Cortí is a native sweet paprika variety, Capsicum annuum, grown in a handful of villages in the centre and south of Mallorca. It's been cultivated on the island for centuries and it tastes like nothing else.

Spanish smoked paprika has that deep woody bite. Hungarian paprika leans earthy and slightly sharp. Tap de Cortí is different from both. It's creamy and fruit-forward, with no bitterness and no heat at all. The flavour is gentle, almost shy. What makes it stand out most is the aroma: a fresh, almost grassy scent when you open the bag, like ripe pepper just picked from the plant.

There's also a smoked version, dried over holm oak fires, which adds a rustic earthiness while keeping that natural sweetness underneath. Both are worth knowing.

How Tap de Cortí Compares to Other Spanish Paprikas

Spain produces three Protected Designation of Origin paprikas, each from a completely different place and with a completely different character. Most people know the other two. Few know this one.

The key difference: Pimentón de la Vera is built around smoke. Pimentón de Murcia is clean and versatile. Tap de Cortí is built around sweetness and freshness, a flavour that comes entirely from the fruit itself, not from any processing technique.

Why the Pods Point Up

One of the first things you notice about Tap de Cortí growing in a field is that the peppers face the sky rather than hanging down like most varieties. It looks unusual. It's actually practical.

The upward growing habit keeps the fruit off the soil during the late-summer rains. In a damp year, a pepper sitting on wet ground can rot within days. Growing skyward is the plant's way of staying clean and dry throughout the season. Over centuries of cultivation in Mallorca's specific conditions, the plants that grew this way survived. The rest didn't.

The soil in Sant Jordi also plays a role. It's calcareous and stony, limestone-rich ground that drains quickly after rain but holds enough moisture in its lower layers to keep the plants fed during dry stretches. The temperatures during the growing season sit between roughly 22 and 28 degrees. Hot enough to ripen the fruit fully, not so hot that it stresses the plant. It's a very specific combination, and it doesn't exist in many places outside these villages, which is why Tap de Cortí grown elsewhere tends to lose something.

Sobrasada and the Paprika Behind It

To understand why Tap de Cortí matters, you need to understand sobrasada.

Sobrasada de Mallorca is a PGI-protected spreadable cured sausage and probably the most important product in Mallorcan food culture. The name comes from the Italian soppressata, brought to the Balearic Islands by Mediterranean traders during the Middle Ages as a way of preserving pork through winter. The recipe is straightforward: lean pork, back fat, salt, spices, and paprika. By law the paprika sits at between 4 and 7% of the total weight.

That sounds like a small amount. It isn't. The paprika is the whole personality of the thing. It gives sobrasada its colour, its sweetness, and its distinctive smell when you slice into it. Sweet paprika only becomes sobrasada dulce. Add some hot paprika and you get sobrasada picante. Change the paprika variety entirely, and you change what sobrasada is.

For most of Mallorcan history, Tap de Cortí was the only paprika available. Its gentleness, the way it brought sweetness and depth without aggression, shaped the character of sobrasada over generations. The sausage and the paprika grew up together. You can't really separate them.

The Harvest and the Red Curtains

In late August, when the peppers reach ripeness, families pick them by hand. Only the best make the cut. Then they're threaded onto strings with a needle and hung from roof beams, balconies, and house facades to dry in the open air. In Catalan this stringing process is called enfila.

The drying takes weeks. Sun and wind draw out the moisture slowly, concentrating the flavour and sugars in the flesh. Open-air drying also preserves compounds that faster industrial methods destroy. The result is a paprika with more complexity than anything that's been through a machine at speed.

And then there's the visual effect: those long red curtains covering the stone walls of the village houses. For people who grew up here, the red curtains appearing in August were as natural as the change of season itself. When they started to disappear, it felt wrong in a way that was hard to explain.

How It Almost Disappeared

The decline wasn't sudden. It built slowly through the 1970s and 1980s as cheaper paprika arrived from the mainland.

Murcia had industrialised paprika production on a large scale. Murcia's prices were often half what Mallorcan farmers charged. The quality wasn't the same, but for most buyers it was close enough. Why pay more for local paprika when you could get something functionally similar from the peninsula at a fraction of the cost?

Mallorcan smallholders couldn't compete. Farming was already becoming less viable as tourism transformed the island's economy and younger generations moved away from agricultural life. One by one, farmers stopped planting Tap de Cortí. By the 1990s global imports from China, Chile, and Peru pushed prices even lower, and the economics made even less sense.

By the early 2000s, Tap de Cortí was genuinely endangered. A few family farms still grew it, mostly out of habit and a feeling that they should. But the genetic pool was narrowing, the older farmers who knew the variety best were ageing, and nobody was systematically fighting to keep it going.

The red curtains were still there in some villages, but fewer every year.

2008: The Decision to Fight Back

The turning point came from a family that had been living alongside this paprika since 1945.

Joan and Jordi Crespí had founded Especias Crespí that year as a small spice shop on Carrer Vallori in Palma. From the beginning they focused on paprika quality, travelling through Mallorcan villages to buy directly from the best producers rather than taking whatever was available. In 1952 they moved the shop to Carrer de El Sindicat. In 1972 they opened a processing factory in the Son Castelló industrial estate, where they could handle roasting, grinding, and packaging themselves.

When the third generation took over, they inherited a business that had watched Tap de Cortí shrink for decades. Coloma Crespí, now leading the company, made a deliberate decision: rather than accept the decline as inevitable, they would reverse it.

In 2008, Especias Crespí planted approximately 6,000 Tap de Cortí seedlings across Sant Jordi and surrounding areas. It was a commercial decision, yes, but it was also something larger. They were making a bet that authentic Mallorcan paprika was worth saving, that there was a future for it, and that somebody had to create that future rather than wait for it to arrive on its own.

Especias Crespí and the Mas Boned Family

Especias Crespí today operates under the Designation of Origin label Paprika de Mallorca and remains the primary producer and seller of authentic Tap de Cortí. Their stalls at Mercat de l'Olivar and Mercat de Santa Catalina are where you go in Palma when you want the real thing. They ship internationally too, which means you can cook with it at home regardless of where you are.

But the preservation of Tap de Cortí isn't only their story.

In Sant Jordi, the Mas Boned family has been part of this landscape for generations. My grandparents, Tomeu (everyone called him Soqueta) and Catalina, farmed this land and cooked from it. They grew Tap de Cortí, used it in everything, and knew it the way you only know something you've worked with your whole life.

I grew up with that knowledge around me. When I started Soqueta Experiences, it wasn't just about teaching cooking. It was about keeping that knowledge alive and passing it on in a form that made sense today. Part of that means maintaining relationships with the small producers still growing Tap de Cortí in Sant Jordi, making sure their work stays economically viable, and making sure visitors leave understanding what this paprika actually is.

Cooking With Tap de Cortí

The first thing to know is that Tap de Cortí rewards restraint. Because the flavour is delicate and the sweetness subtle, it doesn't need much help. Heavy-handed use buries the very thing that makes it interesting.

Use less than you think. If you're used to Spanish smoked paprika or Hungarian paprika, start with about 30% less Tap de Cortí than the recipe suggests and taste from there. The sweetness builds as it infuses, and it's easier to add more than to correct an overdose.

Watch the heat. The aromatic compounds that give Tap de Cortí its fresh character are sensitive to high temperatures. Add it to a sofrito once the pan has come down to moderate heat, not while it's screaming hot. If you're finishing a dish, add it near the end. A quick bloom in warm oil is enough.

Think about what you pair it with. The fruit-forward sweetness works particularly well with rich pork fat, ripe tomatoes, aubergine, white beans, chickpeas, and aged cheeses. The flavour complements rather than competes.

Toast it gently if you want more depth. Some cooks here lightly toast whole Tap de Cortí peppers before grinding, just 20 or 30 seconds in a dry pan over low heat until you smell them. It deepens the flavour without adding smoke.

The Dishes That Use It

Tumbet is probably the most classic example: a baked Mallorcan vegetable casserole of aubergine, courgette, potato, and peppers, layered with a tomato base that's been seasoned with Tap de Cortí. The paprika threads through everything, adding colour and a quiet sweetness that pulls the vegetables into a single dish rather than letting them sit separately.

Arròs Brut is another good example. This is Mallorca's rustic dirty rice, a one-pot dish of meat, seasonal vegetables, and short-grain rice cooked together with broth. The Tap de Cortí goes in early and stains the whole thing a warm reddish colour while adding that characteristic sweetness.

Frit Mallorquí is the more challenging one: pork offal, potatoes, onions, fennel, and peppers cooked together in a pan until everything is soft and the flavours have merged. Tap de Cortí is essential here. Without it the dish loses its identity.

These aren't restaurant dishes. They're the food people actually ate in these villages, cooked on weekdays in normal kitchens from ingredients grown nearby. That's what makes the paprika matter so much.

An Island Flavour That Survived

The story of Tap de Cortí isn't really about a spice. It's about whether a community decides that some things are worth more than their market price.

The scale of cultivation that existed in Sant Jordi fifty years ago isn't coming back. The island's economy has changed too much, farming is too difficult for too little return, and the people who might have grown it instead built hotels or moved to Palma. But Tap de Cortí is still here. It grows in fields a few minutes from the kitchen where I teach. Coloma and the team at Especias Crespí are still planting, still processing, still showing up at the Olivar market every week.

The red curtains still appear on the houses each August. Not as many as there once were, but enough.

Come and Taste It

Reading about a flavour is never the same as actually tasting it.

Soqueta Experiences starts most mornings at Mercat de l'Olivar in Palma, where we visit the Especias Crespí stall alongside the cheese vendors, the fish hall, and the charcuterie producers who still make sobrasada with local paprika. You taste as you go: aged Mahón, black pig sobrasada, seasonal produce from the market gardens in the south of the island.

Then we drive to Sant Jordi. If you haven't been, the village looks like what Mallorca looked like before mass tourism arrived: windmills, stone walls, flat agricultural land, quiet streets. We cook in the family kitchen using clay greixoneres, the traditional Mallorcan cookware, preparing whichever dishes fit the season. Tap de Cortí goes into most of them.

After we eat, we sit at the table. This is the sobremesa, the part of the meal that comes after the meal. Wine, coffee, digestifs, conversation. In a family kitchen in Sant Jordi, it's hard not to understand why this matters.

The Market Tour and Cooking Experience covers both the Olivar visit and the kitchen session. The Traditional Cooking Experience skips the market and goes straight to the recipes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Tap de Cortí? Tap de Cortí is Mallorca's native paprika, a sweet variety of Capsicum annuum cultivated for centuries in the villages of Sant Jordi, Santa Maria del Camí, and Pòrtol. It's the paprika traditionally used to make Mallorcan sobrasada and is protected under the Designation of Origin label Paprika de Mallorca.

What does Tap de Cortí taste like? It's creamy and fruit-forward with no bitterness and no heat. The aroma is fresh and grassy closer to a ripe raw pepper than to any smoked or dried spice. It's significantly milder and sweeter than Spanish smoked paprika or Pimentón de la Vera.

Why did Tap de Cortí almost disappear? In the 1970s and 1980s, cheaper paprika from Murcia and later from China, Chile, and Peru undercut Mallorcan farmers who couldn't compete on price. By the early 2000s only a handful of family farms still grew it. The recovery started in 2008 when Especias Crespí planted approximately 6,000 seedlings across Sant Jordi and surrounding areas.

Where can I buy Tap de Cortí? At the Especias Crespí stalls in Palma's Mercat de l'Olivar and Mercat de Santa Catalina. They also ship internationally through their online shop. You can also cook with it directly during a Soqueta Experiences cooking class in Sant Jordi.

Where to Find Tap de Cortí

If you can't get to Mallorca, Especias Crespí ships their Paprika de Mallorca internationally. Both the sweet and smoked versions are available. They also have stalls at Mercat de l'Olivar and Mercat de Santa Catalina in Palma if you're visiting the island and want to buy it directly. The vendors there can tell you which version suits what you're cooking.

For a better sense of what's available at Mallorca's markets beyond just the paprika, including seasonal produce and where to find it across the island, that's worth reading before you visit.

Why It's Worth Your Attention

Tap de Cortí is quiet. It doesn't shout. It doesn't have the smoky drama of Spanish paprika or the sharp heat of something from Hungary. It just tastes like a place: Mediterranean, sun-warmed, gentle, very specific.

That specificity is exactly what makes it irreplaceable. You cannot recreate what Tap de Cortí does in sobrasada or tumbet or arròs brut by substituting another paprika. The flavour is different and the history behind it is different and those two things are not really separable.

The work of keeping it alive continues. Every time someone plants a new crop, every time a cook reaches for Tap de Cortí instead of something cheaper from the supermarket, every time a visitor comes to Sant Jordi and leaves knowing what this paprika actually is, the picture improves a little.

Come cook with us. Taste what Mallorca actually tastes like.