The arrival of the American chilli, brought back to Seville by Christopher Columbus in 1493, transformed the peninsula’s charcuterie within two centuries. Dried and ground, it becomes pimentón; slowly smoked over holm oak in the smokehouses of Extremadura, it gives pimentón de la Vera. On this spice depend today the colour, the taste and the preservation of the greater part of Iberian sausages: without it, the chorizo, the sobrassada and the chouriço would not have the form we know.

The peninsula did not merely adopt the chilli; it re-exported it. The chorizo crossed the Atlantic with the Spanish colonists and was transformed in Mexico under the influence of the ancho chilli (a mild, fruity chilli with deep notes of cocoa, coffee, liquorice and dried fruit) and cane vinegar, to the point that its Sevillian creators would scarcely recognise it. The linguiça followed the Portuguese caravels to Brazil, to Goa and to the islands of the Indian Ocean, leaving at each port of call a variant of its own, such as the Goan chouriço, born of the meeting between Iberian technique and the palm vinegar of the Konkan. The details of these chilli routes are traced in the chapter ‘The circulations’.

An older aromatic stratum precedes the chilli. Eight centuries of Arab presence left traces in the peninsula that the Reconquista slowed but did not erase: the cumin of certain southern chorizos, the vinegar used as a preservative, and the warm spices of the Andalusian morcillas testify to a dense culinary circulation between al-Andalus and the rest of the peninsula prior to 1493.

The Portuguese alheira and farinheira form a case apart. In 1497, after King Manuel I had imposed the conversion of the Jews of Portugal, the cristãos-novos made sausages whose appearance imitated pork charcuterie but whose composition contained none: poultry, bread and spices for the alheira, flour and fat for the farinheira. Conceived as proof of religious conformity before the Inquisition's inspectors, they are today protected by several regional PGIs and made without reference to their original context.

The peninsula's internal diversity resists any synthesis. Spain alone produces types that sometimes have nothing in common but the pork and the pimentón: the sobrassada de Mallorca, a spreadable paste whose fat content reaches 70 per cent, in no way resembles the botillo del Bierzo, filled with whole ribs and smoked over chestnut wood; the Basque chistorra, thin and eaten within days, stands opposite the Portuguese salpicão, made of pieces of loin dried for several weeks. Portugal, for its part, has organised almost all its charcuterie around maceration in massa de pimentão, a paste of paprika, garlic and wine that the neighbouring Spanish traditions do not use. It is perhaps the trait that most clearly distinguishes Portuguese charcuterie from the rest of the peninsula.

The flows have reversed today. The Brazilian linguiça, transformed over two centuries, returns to the grocers of the Luso-Brazilian communities of Europe; the chorizo mexicano, become unrecognisable, is found in the Latin American shops of Madrid and Barcelona; the sobrassada de Mallorca, long confined to its archipelago, has appeared since the 2010s on restaurant menus in London, Paris and New York.