Garcima

Garcima starts in a Valencian forge in 1920, where Antonio Garcia Montoro hammered out farming and cutting tools to support his family. The work was iron, fire and repetition, and it built the skills the brand still runs on.

In the 1940s his son Enrique Garcia Marti took over the workshop and made the first handmade paellas. Raw materials were scarce, so a usable pan came out of whatever scrap iron could be found. Enrique's wife Encarnacion sold them from a stall in the Central Market of Valencia, and a name for honest, well-made cookware took hold.

The third generation, Antonio Garcia Campos, drove the expansion. New machinery replaced parts of the hand process, a sales network was built, and the first exports went to South America. A new factory followed in 1975, and in 1979 the company was formally named Garcima, S.L.D.

The fourth generation took the brand international from the 1990s. In 1992 Garcima helped cook the largest paella in the world, a twenty-metre pan in Valencia. The family still makes its carbon steel, enamelled and stainless steel pans in the same corner of Spain it has worked from for over a century.