Dénia challenges 11 UNESCO cities to make local versions of paella

Organised by the Comunidad Valenciana regional tourism board, World Paella Day was spearheaded by the northern Alicante-province coastal town of Dénia, one of two locations in Spain that holds the title of UNESCO Creative Culinary City.

Dénia is not in fact a city – it is home to 41,733 people, three in 10 of whom are foreign, and of these, six in 10 are from the EU-27 with Germans, at 2,619 in total, making up the town's largest European national group.

About one in 10 of Dénia's 12,400 foreigners is from a non-EU European country, including the UK, and a quarter of these is from Latin America.

The other Creative Culinary City in Spain is, indeed, a city – Burgos, capital of the province of the same name in the centre-northern region of Castilla y León, and famous for being home to the second-largest cathedral in the country and, arguably, the most attractive, not just in Spain, but on earth.

Both these, and 10 other towns and cities worldwide holding the UNESCO Creative Culinary City title took part simultaneously in a paella bake-off, using whatever ingredients they could source locally.

Participating chefs were all filmed cooking in their own restaurant kitchens, meaning nobody needed to travel.

Tsuruoka in Japan, Rasht in Iran, Portoviejo in Ecuador, Popayán in Colombia, Ensenada in México, the Brazilian cities of Belém (in the State of Pará, at the Amazon delta), Florianópolis (in the far-southern coastal State of Santa Catarina) and Paraty (in the State of Rio de Janeiro), and the US cities of Tucson (State of Arizona) and San Antonio (Texas).

Dénia sent invites to Burgos and all the above cities, challenging them to a paella competition in a bid to 'share our great dish with the rest of the world to celebrate its international nature', which the east-coast beach town said went 'beyond recipes and ingredients'.

Eight million internet searches every year in connection with paella make it the fourth most famous dish on earth, and one that is always synonymous with the Valencia region.

Although it appears to have literally hundreds of varieties, paella is only the name of a handful – the rest are simply referred to as 'rice dishes'; however, they follow much the same style of cooking and are typically known as 'paella' to the layperson or the non-Spaniard.

Each participating town or city was given a basic recipe with a list of suggested ingredients and traditional preparation methods, but were invited to work with what they had available in their own countries or regions and using their own cooking traditions.

Instructions had to be flexible, since, aside from the obvious issue of ingredients not always being readily available, paella pans are rarely found outside of Spain, meaning chefs would have to improvise using woks, large saucepans or frying pans, or something similar.

Getting 'creative' with paella has long caused controversy on and off social media – British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver's ill-advised decision to add chorizo spicy sausage to it was labelled an 'abomination' on Twitter, and versions that are nothing like paella as it is known in Spain have been dubbed arroz con cosas, or 'rice with things', criticising the random nature of the ingredients used.

But all debates on what constitutes 'paella' and what is basically 'rice with bits in it' were suspended earlier this month for World Paella Day, as Dénia and the rest of the region waited keenly to see what international takes on the dish came out of two other continents and seven countries.

Dénia's own entry was whipped up by chef Rafa Margós – founder member of the El Paeller association - on a wood fire at his Las Bairetas restaurant.