Hi there, I'm Lale Arakoglu, and welcome to an episode of Women Who Travel

where we're traveling around Spain with Eva Longoria.

Eva's new CNN shows Searching for Spain is a follow-up to her series Searching for Mexico,

which ran in 2023.

So I didn't know Spain as well. And so that's the difference is like Mexico, I felt like I was at home. Spain really felt like a fish out of water. And I was really curious and

engaged in like the history of gastronomy in the country, but also the history of

the ingredients and how things ended up there and colonization and how did that help and Franco's

dictatorship and how did that have an effect on food. But I do live part-time in Spain. I live in

Marbella in the South, so I'm familiar with the South,

but everything else, I was just visited, you know, very, very superficially. And so to go to Spain

in this way with the show, really dig in deeply, was a gift. With the CNN research team, they really look at food stories.

I mean, that's what drives this series is like, is there a food story there?

So sometimes there will be regions that are very popular, but there's no food story.

So we really, that's kind of the lens in which we look at each region.

And there's obvious cities and regions we went to, like Madrid being its own episode

and Catalonia being its own episode, Pais Basco, the Basque, the Basque being its own.

And then after that, just trying to find the stories and the history and what would be visually beautiful,

what people and chefs we wanted to follow.

What was daunting was speaking Castilian Spanish, because I didn't grow up speaking Spanish.

I spoke Spanish in the Mexico Spanish because I didn't grow up speaking Spanish. I spoke

Spanish in the Mexico series because I'm Mexican, but like to go to the mother country of Spain

and to speak Castiano, which is very different than Mexican Spanish, that was daunting. So I was

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