I have visited many fish markets around the world and I think I will never get tired – nor bored – of visiting more of them each time I arrive into a new city, regardless its size or location. The most beautiful, clean and diversified fish market I have seen so far is Mercado Central from Valencia, but I prefer the colourful, vibrant and picturesque Asian markets where the fresh fish is displayed in huge piles, the vendors are friendly and the prices are always lower than expected.

A very attractive type of fish market is the one that offers you something more than only buying, admiring and taking photos – and that is eating. We are not gourmands, but we love tasting local fish and seafood whenever we can, especially if we can choose our favourites after watching them with the naked eye and not in the pictures from a menu card. The most numerous and rich fish markets of this kind we found in Philippines and Dampa Fish Market from Manila is one of them. Situated close to the waterfront and only 5 minutes away from the big Mall of Asia, Dampa Fish Market consists of two areas – one area for displaying/ buying/ admiring the goods and another one for eating.

Both the open and sheltered areas designated for selling fresh fish include lots of stalls where the products are displayed in piles and groups, according to their type – small fish, medium fish, big fish, huge fish (already cut in fillets), shrimp, squid, calamari, shells (of different sizes and colours), lobsters, crabs, fish eggs, seaweed.

Dampa Fish Market is very popular among locals and not so much visited by tourists and it is open everyday, from morning until 10 o’clock in the night ( until midnight on Saturdays).

We visited the market twice until now and we hope to go there again soon.

First, we arrived there on a Saturday afternoon together with Martin, our second mate. It was very hot outside and not the right time for dinner, but the market was quite animated with colourful displays of fresh products and happy vendors. We had a walk along the aisles; we admired and photographed the fish – some of which I had never seen before – we socialized with some of the vendors and asked them questions about the name of this fish or the price of the other one. As we were the only visitors at that time of the day, all the vendors started to ‘attack’ us with invitations to buy or just photograph their products, promising best quality and ‘big discounts’.

We made a complete tour of both open and sheltered areas, stopped from time to time in front of some tables where the display of fish was bigger or just the vendors friendlier, we took a lot of photos with the colourful piles of fresh products and decided to move on.

We came back to Dampa after four weeks, on a Friday evening – in a different company – but determined to taste some of the local fish and seafood and serve our dinner in one of the restaurants sheltered under the name of Dampa Fish Market.

After checking the offers for only a few minutes, we chose our favourite vendor and let him present all his products before deciding what to buy and, eventually, eat.

The choice was great and our decision a little difficult to take, but we finally managed to buy one kg of shrimps, one kg of squid and one fish. We paid ~ 1300 pesos for all the products (~ 25 euros) and we accepted our vendor’s proposal and went to a small restaurant behind his counter to have our products cooked – grilled and fried per our request.

We paid an extra fee of 200 pesos for each kg of fish/seafood and enjoyed a wonderful dinner with our friends.

We hope to go back to  one day, to try different fish and maybe taste a lobster.