Mantequerías Bravo

Mantequerías Bravo opened in 1931, when Cruz Bravo established the shop on Calle Ayala in Madrid's Salamanca neighborhood, after years working from age fourteen as an apprentice in a Madrid ultramarinos — a general grocery. Nearly a century later the business remains in the same family's hands at the same address, its wooden storefront and much of its mid-twentieth-century interior intact.

It is worth being precise about what kind of shop this is: not a single-product ham specialist, but a full gourmet delicatessen. Alongside jamón ibérico de bellota, it stocks a wine cellar built around labels such as Vega Sicilia, extra virgin olive oils the shop describes as pressed from trees up to 2,000 years old, hand-made conservas, foie gras, caviar, and French cheeses. Ham has been part of that range since the shop's ultramarinos origins, sold alongside the coffee Cruz Bravo once roasted on the street outside in the 1940s.

Mantequerías Bravo still trades from the same Calle Ayala address as a family-run neighborhood institution rather than a chain. It is named directly in this category's own anchor documentation alongside Cinco Jotas, which is the basis for its inclusion here — with the caveat, stated plainly, that jamón is one specialty among several rather than the whole of what the shop sells.