Coca amb Tonyina
A thin pastry filled with tuna or melva, slow-cooked onion, pine nuts and aniseed, eaten on the night of 20 June, when the first Fogueres de Sant Joan monument goes up. It's always paired with bacores, the season's first figs.
💡 Local tip: Alicante's bakeries start selling it days before the plantà; buy it fresh that same week — it doesn't keep well for more than a couple of days.
Coca amb tonyina is the bite that marks the night of the plantà, when the monuments of the Fogueres de Sant Joan go up across Alicante's streets in the early hours of 20 to 21 June. It began as a snack or reward handed to the volunteers helping to build the monuments; over time it became the treat the whole city looks for that night.
Written references to the custom go back to the early twentieth century: the writer Rafael Altamira mentions it in a chapter devoted to the nit de Sant Joan in his 1910 book, and the poet Juan Vidal Ramos names it in his verses about the festival.
It's made with a thin pastry base, flaked tonyina (tuna or melva), onion fried until caramelised, pine nuts and a touch of aniseed, and served alongside bacores, the fig tree's first fruit ahead of the main harvest.
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