Museo de Saleros y Pimenteros

The Museo de Saleros y Pimenteros holds more than 20,000 salt and pepper shakers gathered from around the world, arranged by material — wood, glass, plastic, metal — or by theme, from animals to Christmas motifs. It is one of the more unexpected stops in Guadalest, a village of barely 280 residents that at one point held eight separate museums.

Thirty years of collecting

Collector Andrea Ludden, a trained archaeologist, spent more than thirty years gathering salt and pepper shakers before opening this museum in 2010. Only one other museum in the world is devoted entirely to the same object, in the town of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, which makes the Guadalest collection a rarity even within a village already known for its unusual museums.

The only step-free museum

Unlike the rest of Guadalest's museums, perched inside the old town and reachable only via steps, this one sits at street level next to the main car park, with no stairs to climb. It is therefore the only one of the group that is fully accessible for visitors with reduced mobility or for large groups, who find room to move here that the village's narrow lanes rarely allow.

Admission is ticketed, and the visit fits easily into the wider route, whether before crossing the Portal de San José into the old town or after coming down from the Castillo de San José. For visitors with children, it also makes for a lighter stop than the village's history museums, with a streak of humour rarely found elsewhere in the area.