“In Loja, the most important municipality of western Granada, Congelados Apolo was born in 1963, as an exciting project conceived by a young newlywed couple, Apolonio Alcaide and Ana Ávila.

A company in Madrid, called Congelados Niza, which at that time was setting up the first frozen food stores in Spain, gave us the opportunity to start this business. We were the first in the whole province of Granada and one of the first in Andalusia to work with frozen fish and other foods.

After the opening, the first days we had a lot of curious people who wanted to know what was what they had come to call “the stiff fish”. In our early days, because of the lack of knowledge about frozen food, many more people came to look than to buy. We went through a rough patch, as all beginnings are, but the experts advised us to hold on, that this was the future.

At that time, we began to cut fish into slices and pack them in half-kilo bags; we also did it with potas, skate, hake and peeled shrimp, the latter at 100 grams. We served small orders to the stores, because their cold network was limited to domestic freezers. Our means of transport at that time were a Guzzy motorcycle and a Renault 4L. Then came the day when freezer cabinets burst onto the market, and with them came our salvation.

That was our beginning. After two long years of real desperation, we started to take off. We registered our trademark, Apolo, and we dedicated our whole lives to working hard so that our business, which we loved so much and which we worked so hard to build, would grow day by day.

After several extensions, the passing of the years, the constancy of the work and thanks to the drive of the nephews, who in 1983 became part of the project, today we can boast of having a great company and that the brand of Mariscos y Congelados Apolo has recognition in Spain and, every day more, in other countries. Apolo, which is what I affectionately called my husband when we got married that year, would be very proud”.

Ana Avila