Ask most visitors to name a banderilla and they will describe exactly one thing: the Gilda, a skewered olive, pickled chili, and anchovy from San Sebastián. That answer is not wrong. It is just incomplete. The Gilda is one member of a wider family of cold, skewered pintxos that predates it, outlived every imitation it inspired, and still shows up on bar counters across the Basque Country and Navarra in forms most visitors never learn to recognize.
That gap matters because it changes how you order. A traveler who only knows the word “banderilla” as a synonym for “Gilda” will walk past a tray of plain vinegar-pickled skewers assuming it’s a lesser version of the famous one, or miss Bilbao’s egg-and-prawn variant entirely because it doesn’t look like what the guidebook described. Knowing the actual shape of the category, what came before the Gilda and what came after it, means ordering with intention instead of pointing at the only word you know.
This account draws on the Real Academia Española’s own dictionary entry for banderilla, Spain’s documented pincho and tapa history, and the independently corroborated bar-culture record of how the Gilda and its regional descendants came to be, cross-checked across Basque and Navarran food press rather than a single retelling.
What Actually Separates a Banderilla From a Pintxo
A banderilla is not simply another word for pintxo in general, a distinction Encierro has covered in depth separately. It is a specific, narrower category inside it: always served cold, always built on a skewer roughly ten centimeters long, and never made with bread. A standard pintxo, the Basque spelling used throughout this region (Spanish: pinchos), is frequently a warm slice of bread topped with something. A banderilla skips the bread entirely and threads its ingredients, almost always pickled, directly onto the toothpick.
The name comes from the Real Academia Española’s own dictionary entry, and the format has a documented culinary lineage that runs through Spain’s broader pickle and preserved-food tradition, the encurtido, long before any single bar claimed to have invented it. What most guides skip is that the plain, unglamorous version of this skewer existed and was already a fixture of Spanish bar counters before the 1940s, well before the story that visitors actually get told.
Two banderillas per person is the traditional serving, plated together rather than offered one at a time, and they are built specifically to be eaten alongside a beer. The vinegar in the pickle clashes with wine in a way that bartenders and regulars have long since worked around by defaulting to a caña instead.
The format itself sits inside a much older Spanish tradition: the encurtido, or vinegar-pickled preserve. Long before any bar built a signature skewer, Spanish taverns kept jars of pickled vegetables on hand as a way to stretch bar snacks through the year without refrigeration, a practical solution that predates the 20th century entirely. The banderilla is what happened when that pantry staple got threaded onto a toothpick and moved from the jar to the counter as a snack in its own right. Understanding that lineage is the difference between treating the banderilla as a 1940s invention and recognizing it as a decades-older preservation habit that a San Sebastián bar eventually made famous.
The Plain Banderilla Existed Before the Gilda Did
Strip away the Gilda’s fame and the base banderilla is simple: a pickled gherkin, a pitted olive, a cocktail onion, a strip of piquillo or bell pepper, and a guindilla chili, threaded together on one skewer. No anchovy. No signature story. This is the version that predates the Gilda, and it is still the version sold commercially today under the plain name “banderilla,” packaged separately from anything branded “Gilda,” a distinction the pickle and preserves trade itself maintains because the two are genuinely different products, not marketing variants of one idea.
This plain version is what most Spanish bars kept in a jar or a standing tray on the counter for decades before the 1940s, the era typically credited with the Gilda’s invention. It is the base recipe, the one every later variation, including the Gilda, modifies rather than replaces.
The Gilda Is a Variation, Not the Definition
The most famous banderilla by a wide margin is the Gilda: a pickled guindilla pepper, a manzanilla olive, and a cured Cantabrian anchovy, threaded onto a single toothpick. It was invented at a long-running San Sebastián bar in the late 1940s, when a regular customer began skewering the three ingredients together while drinking his wine, and the combination eventually took its name from Rita Hayworth’s title character in the 1946 film Gilda, a joking comparison to the dish’s mix of “green and spicy” outside and cured intensity inside. Encierro has told the full ingredient-by-ingredient story of that invention separately.
What matters for understanding the category is this: the Gilda swapped the plain banderilla’s gherkin, onion, and pepper for a single cured anchovy fillet, kept the olive, and kept the chili. It is a variation built on the existing format, not the format’s origin point. Treating it as the definition of “banderilla” is the equivalent of treating one topping combination as the definition of pizza.
Bilbao’s Answer: The Bilbainito
Roughly seventy kilometers west, Bilbao developed its own banderilla, and it looks nothing like the Gilda. The bilbainito threads a boiled egg and a cooked prawn together with mayonnaise, sometimes with an olive added, no vinegar-pickled vegetables at all.
The name traces to a specific, well-documented bar-culture story rather than an ancient tradition. Iñaki Azkuna, who served as mayor of Bilbao from 1999 to 2014, was a regular at a bar in the city’s Casco Viejo, where he ordered this exact egg-and-prawn combination so often that the bartender began calling it “the Azkuna.” The name generalized from there into “bilbainito,” roughly “the little Bilbao one,” and it is now treated as a signature pincho of the city in its own right, distinct enough from the vinegar-pickle banderillas of San Sebastián and the wider region that many visitors do not immediately recognize it as belonging to the same family at all.
That the bilbainito exists, and that it has its own separate, independently told origin story, is itself the clearest evidence that “banderilla” was never a single fixed recipe. It is a format, cold and skewered, that different cities filled with different ingredients.
The Seafood Variants Most Visitors Never Order
Beyond the plain vinegar skewer, the Gilda, and the bilbainito, Basque and Navarran bars carry a handful of seafood-driven banderillas that rarely make it into English-language coverage. A banderilla de mejillón adds a pickled or vinegar-cured mussel to the base combination, a natural extension of the region’s much broader mussel-bar culture. Others swap in smoked cod (bacalao ahumado) or a second cured anchovy fillet in place of the standard pepper-and-onion pairing, sold today by long-established Basque conserva producers such as Aperitivos La Real, who package and sell these combinations as standing product lines, not one-off bar inventions.
Worth noting for anyone reading a Basque menu closely: a txalupa, Basque for “little boat,” looks similar on paper but is a genuinely different pincho, a puff-pastry shell shaped like a boat and filled with a creamy prawn, mushroom, or anchovy mixture. It is not skewered and not vinegar-based, so despite some commercial packaging that borrows the name loosely, it does not belong in the banderilla family proper.
How Banderillas Are Sold and Served Today
Two separate markets keep the banderilla alive. In bars across the Basque Country and Navarra, they are still made fresh behind the counter or kept ready on a standing tray, priced by the piece alongside the rest of the pintxo spread. Outside the bar, long-established Basque conserva houses package and sell the same combinations commercially, jarred and shelf-stable, sold under the plain “banderilla” name as a distinct product line from anything labeled “Gilda.” That commercial split is itself useful evidence for a visitor trying to understand the category: the trade that manufactures and sells these things at scale treats the plain banderilla and the Gilda as two different products, not one dish with a nickname.
In Pamplona specifically, banderillas are part of the same pintxo culture that runs along Calle Estafeta, Calle San Nicolás, and Plaza del Castillo, the historic Casco Antiguo corridor that anchors the city’s bar-hopping tradition during San Fermines and the rest of the year. A visitor working that route who only asks for “a Gilda” will get exactly that and nothing else. Asking for “una banderilla” instead opens the door to whatever the bar has built that week, plain, seafood, or otherwise.
FAQ
What is a banderilla in Spanish food?
A banderilla is a cold Spanish bar snack built on a roughly ten-centimeter wooden skewer, almost always featuring pickled ingredients such as gherkins, olives, cocktail onions, and a guindilla chili. It is a distinct sub-category of pintxo, always cold and always skewered, never made with bread.
Is a banderilla the same as a Gilda?
No. A Gilda is one specific, famous banderilla, made from a pickled guindilla pepper, a manzanilla olive, and a cured anchovy. The plain banderilla, built from gherkin, olive, cocktail onion, and pepper with no anchovy, existed first and is still sold and served separately today.
What is a bilbainito pincho?
A bilbainito is a Bilbao banderilla made from a boiled egg, a cooked prawn, and mayonnaise, with no vinegar-pickled vegetables. It is named after former Bilbao mayor Iñaki Azkuna, a regular customer known for ordering the combination.
Are banderillas eaten with beer or wine?
Traditionally with beer. The vinegar from the pickled ingredients clashes with wine, so bars and regulars default to ordering a caña alongside a plate of banderillas rather than a glass of wine.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.