Migas Weren’t Invented By Poverty. The First Written Recipe Came From a King’s Own Chef.

Migas gets introduced the same way almost everywhere: a shepherd’s dish, born of scarcity, stale bread fried in oil because there was nothing else in the sack. It is a tidy story, and it is not where the written record actually starts. The earliest confirmed written recipe for migas in a Spanish-language cookbook appears in 1611, inside the Arte de Cozina, Pastelería, Vizcochería y Conservería of Francisco Martínez Montiño, who was not a shepherd but the royal chef to Felipe II, Felipe III, and Felipe IV. The book, held today in the collections referenced by the Biblioteca Nacional de España’s own gastronomy archive, is one of the most reprinted cookbooks in Spanish history. A dish now sold to tourists as rustic peasant food has a documented lineage that runs first through a royal kitchen.

Getting the order right matters for more than trivia. It changes how the dish should be read on a menu in Navarra, where migas is not a museum piece but a living tradition tied to an active shepherding route that still operates every autumn. The valleys of Roncal and Salazar send tens of thousands of sheep on a week-long walk to winter pasture in the Bardenas Reales, a migration documented in writing since the 9th century, and migas is still the food shepherds prepare along that route today. One restaurant in the hilltop village of Ujué has built an international reputation on exactly this dish, run for more than forty years by a family whose founder was a shepherd himself before he opened a kitchen.

What follows draws on the Biblioteca Nacional de España’s own gastronomy holdings, published food-history research on Martínez Montiño’s 1611 cookbook, Noticias de Navarra’s coverage of the Roncal-Salazar trashumancia, and the Ibáñez-Valencia family’s own published record of their restaurant in Ujué.

The Arab Precursor and a King’s Cookbook, Not a Peasant’s Kitchen

Migas did not appear from nowhere in the 17th century. Food historians trace its lineage to tharid, a dish of bread cooked or sautéed in a fat-enriched liquid that Arab cooks brought to the Iberian Peninsula during the medieval period. Far from a poor man’s meal, tharid was served as a gift of honor to distinguished guests visiting Muslim palaces and elevated households, according to research cited in Spanish food-history writing on the dish’s origins, including Francisco Abad’s 2005 study of migas’ Arab roots. Christian territories adapted the dish and, in a detail that says something about the religious politics of medieval Iberia, began adding pork fat to it specifically to distinguish it from Arab and Jewish cooking.

Earlier still, precursor dishes called hormigos appear in Francisco Delicado’s 1528 work La Lozana Andaluza, describing wheat porridges and unleavened bread preparations that predate migas as it is eaten today. But none of these are migas by name, and none appear in a dedicated Christian recipe collection until Martínez Montiño’s 1611 book, decades after Felipe II’s own reign had ended. By the mid-16th century, a version resembling the modern dish, built from bread, pork products, and paprika, had already spread among Iberian farmers and herders, according to the same historical research. The written record, in other words, moves in the opposite direction most retellings assume: from a court kitchen and a documented Arab antecedent, downward into rural kitchens, not upward from them.

How the Dish Migrated From Palace Table to Pasture

Once migas took hold among rural communities in the second half of the 16th century, it diversified along the same routes that shepherds themselves walked. Regional variants that share almost nothing in seasoning frequently share a shepherding corridor: the paprika-heavy migas of Albarracín in Aragón closely resembles the Extremaduran version, a coincidence traceable to the historic droving roads connecting both regions, and the same base recipe appears across the border in Portugal’s Alentejo, another historic transhumance zone. Aragonese migas add onion as a defining ingredient; Manchegan migas, sometimes called ruleras for the constant stirring the recipe demands, are traditionally served alongside grapes, pomegranate, or melon; Andalusian versions add aniseed and cured pork fat.

Navarra’s own migas sits inside this same pattern; it is a shepherd’s dish first, shaped by which valley’s shepherds were cooking it and what they had on hand, which is precisely why a single “authentic” recipe does not exist even within the region. What does exist, and what most general coverage of migas skips entirely, is a specific, still-functioning migration route behind Navarra’s version of the dish.

Navarra’s Own Migas: The Roncal-Salazar Trashumancia and the Bardenas Reales

Each autumn, shepherds from the Roncal and Salazar valleys move tens of thousands of sheep, roughly 80,000 in recent years according to Noticias de Navarra, on a week-long walk south to winter grazing land in the Bardenas Reales, the semi-desert natural park shared by 22 Navarran towns. This is not a revived custom staged for visitors. Written references to transhumance between the Roncal valley and the Bardenas date to the 9th century, and the Salazar valley secured its own legal right to graze the same land in the 16th century. The crossing point at Carcastillo, known as El Paso, still marks the convergence of the historic Roncalese and Salacenco droving roads before the flocks continue into the park itself, and the town now holds an annual Fiesta de los Usos Tradicionales de la Trashumancia each September 17, with migas tastings as part of the program.

Migas earns its place on that program because it was, and still is, road food: a dish that takes time, uses ingredients a shepherd could carry or find, and can be cooked over an open fire when rain makes it impractical to walk sheep out to graze on wet grass. It connects directly to the same Bardenas Reales land the flocks have crossed into for over a thousand years, one of the few Navarran dishes with a continuously documented working purpose rather than a purely ceremonial one.

Ujué’s Migas de Pastor: How One Family Restaurant Became “the World’s Best”

The clearest place to see Navarra’s migas tradition intact is not a museum but a working kitchen. In 1967, Hipólito Ibáñez left shepherding behind and, with his wife Juli Valencia, opened the first restaurant in the medieval hilltop village of Ujué, beside the fortress-church of Santa María. Their restaurant, Mesón Las Torres, has served migas de pastor daily for more than forty years, prepared today by the third generation of the same family. The dish has since earned international attention, including Spanish television coverage from TVE, for what many food writers and regional press have called some of the best shepherd’s migas in the world.

The Ujué version leans on specifics the shepherd-poverty story tends to flatten: pan cabezón, a dense, heavy-crusted local bread specifically suited to absorbing liquid without disintegrating; lamb tallow rather than olive oil as the base fat, a direct holdover from actual shepherding rations; and a wood fire, which the family credits with distributing heat evenly enough to keep the bread from clumping. Garlic, tomato, wild mushrooms, and ham round out the modern version served in the restaurant’s dining rooms, one of which looks north toward the Pyrenees and south, on clear days, as far as the Moncayo massif. None of this reads as an improvised, whatever-was-in-the-sack dish. It reads as a technique refined over decades by people who grew up around sheep, not away from them.

Txistorra Migas and the Fiesta-Week Table

Outside Ujué, home cooks and bars across Navarra have adapted the dish for daily eating, and the most common modern substitution replaces plain pork fat or lamb tallow with txistorra, the region’s thin, fast-curing sausage. Navarran butchers’ recipes for migas con txistorra follow the same basic structure as the pastoral original: bread soaked and rested for at least an hour, then fried with garlic, onion, bacon, and sliced txistorra until the bread turns golden and separates into loose, individual pieces rather than a solid mass. It is heavier and more deliberately savory than the version built for a shepherd’s fire, but it keeps the dish’s defining technical challenge intact, since migas that clump together in the pan are considered a failed batch by anyone who grew up eating them correctly.

During San Fermín itself, migas is not typically the dish served at the post-encierro almuerzo table, which tends toward lighter fare eaten standing in the street. It belongs more naturally to a sit-down midday or evening meal, the kind eaten at a table in a village restaurant rather than balanced on a napkin between bar stops. That distinction is itself useful for a visitor trying to understand why a dish this associated with Navarra rarely appears in fiesta-week food roundups aimed at tourists staying inside Pamplona’s old town.

Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.