The best snacks to put in your backpack Back to News

Walkers need fuel. The best fuel is to be found in the small bakeries and stores of the villages and towns where you’ll rest your weary feet. We’ll include picnic lunches where there are no shopping opportunities as you set out in the morning, but elsewhere you’ll enjoy searching out the local specialities and filling your backpack with goodies and treats for the day ahead.

We asked our local contacts to recommend some picnic essentials, and you’ll certainly have your own favourites too. Join the conversation on our Facebook and Instagram pages to tell us about your tastiest discoveries while travelling, or your lunch snack of choice when walking nearer to home.

In Mallorca these delicious spiral-shaped sweet buns known as ensaimadas are the perfect pick-me-up when walking. Our local contact Jesca also recommends an empanada – a meat-filled pastry originally made for Easter but now available all year round – or a cocarrois to keep you going, the latter bursting with seasonal vegetables, pine nuts and raisins.

You’ll find the little daisy-shaped biscuits known as Margheritine di Stresa in the pasticcerie of Stresa on our Lake Maggiore route. They were created in 1857 at Caffè Bolongaro in the elegant lakeside town to mark the first communion of Princess Margherita, the same lady for whom margherita pizza was later named. They’d make a perfect snack for your walk to the top of Mottarone.

The English counties of Cornwall and Devon disagree over the origins of the pasty, each claiming theirs to be the original. These pastry cases are traditionally filled with beef, potato, onion and swede, sealed with crimping along the top in Devon and on the side in Cornwall (vegetarian options now available too). Being easy to carry, they’re ideal for a walker’s lunch, wherever they are made!

Petr tells us that Czechs love visiting the bakeries of Bohemia. The wonderful aromas and huge variety of baked goods produce ‘decision paralysis’, he says, faced with chosing between goodies such as Hořice rolls (thin wafers rolled into tubes, and perfect dunked into hot chocolate) or Sejkory, a potato pancake local to the area. There’s a great array of biscuits, chocolate and gingerbread too.

Our man in Northern Portugal, Paul, sent us this picture from walker Merete, who was so impressed with the fishcakes made by our host Bia in Lindoso that she asked for the recipe. They’re now a firm favourite at home, and a happy reminder of her walk through the remote villages and hills of the Peneda-Gerês National Park.