Wafer-thin … the all-important, yet highly ineffectual, servilletas. Photograph: C Romance/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Wafer-thin … the all-important, yet highly ineffectual, servilletas. Photograph: C Romance/Getty Images Art and design ‘The beauty of the useless’: Spain’s super-thin restaurant napkins are throwaway art treasures Forever flimsy and ineffective at cleaning greasy fingers, the servilletas of the Iberian peninsula resist the relentless ‘optimisation’ of our age. A new photo book recognises them as cultural treasures in miniature
Abbas Asaria Thu 18 Jun 2026 06.00 CEST Last modified on Thu 18 Jun 2026 07.10 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google I f you have ever eaten a meal in a bar, cafe or restaurant in Spain and grabbed a napkin from the ubiquitous small metal dispensers, you will be familiar with the most intriguing feature of the wafer-thin servilletas : how utterly functionally useless they are.
View image in fullscreen Top tapas … Bocardi Bar. From the book Servilletas: Spanish Napkins Photograph: Felipe Hernandez Don’t bother using them to mop up spilled liquid, as they are less likely to soak up the spillage than protect it with an impermeable barrier. Never make the mistake of blowing your nose in them when you have a cold or a hay fever attack: they’ll just spread the mess to your hands. Their papery texture – originally meant to keep your hands clean while picking up oily snacks – has somehow endured despite their most common purpose being to clean your fingers and lips. For this, they are far from effective, and you end up flying through half a dozen for every croqueta .
And yet these humble serviettes are a deeply cherished part of the Spanish way of life. Piling scrunched up servilletas on a plate after use may seem the logical choice, yet in some establishments patrons simply chuck them on the ground, along with olive pits and other detritus acquired from snacking. A floor littered with servilletas is a sign that you’ve entered a bar that is humble and authentic . “The servilletas are made of paper,” reads a sign on the wall in my go-to place for callos , Bar Alonso in Madrid’s Prosperidad neighbourhood, “and just like prawn shells, they’re to be thrown on to the floor.” (Don’t mistake it for a universally loved custom, though, other establishments have campaigned against it , and it’s now a less common habit.)
View image in fullscreen Catch … Bar Corder. From Servilletas: Spanish Napkins. Photograph: Felipe Hernandez The serviettes’ useless papery texture has one great upshot: they’re easily printable with all kinds of text and monochrome imagery. Even your standard servilleta , which thanks you for your patronage with the phrase “ gracias por su visita ”, can be a source of juvenile amusement: in my university days, most students knew how to fold them so that the text instead read gracias puta .
The real joy, however, lies within the bars and restaurants that choose to pay a little extra to have personalised servilletas . Madrid-based photographer Felipe Hernandez has been collecting these little gastronomical mementoes from down-to-earth restaurants across the country since 2014. By 2017 he’d accumulated more than 150, which was when he decided to start photographing them on a white marble slab he had in his studio, and uploading them to a dedicated Instagram account . Last month he released the book Servilletas , containing 600 of the 1,000-plus in his collection.
Some of them use th…