Paella has a tomato-based sauce and includes a lot of herbs like garlic. Spanish cooking includes flavorful herbs, but not hot spices. There are a lot of different varieties of paella, but the most common is made with white rice and many kinds of shellfish. The seafood is normally shrimp, mussels and baby octopus. (Can you remember what baby octopi are called in Spanish from my logbook?) It can also be made with black squid ink rice, but I haven't tried that kind yet.
La tortilla española is very different from anything I had eaten in the United States. You start by cutting and cooking the potatoes and onions in a frying pan. Then you add the whisked egg and let it cook around the other food. Occasionally it is flipped like a pancake and eventually you will have something that looks like my picture. People here take a lot of liberty with the ingredients. I've seen spinach, cheese, and peppers all added to a tortilla before. However, if you ask someone from Salamanca specifically, tortilla is only tortilla if it only has the three traditional ingredients.
Both dishes are very demonstrative of the local environment. Seafood is a large part of the economy in the coastal regions of Spain, like Andalucía and Catalonia. There, they participate in Mediterranean culture where everything is more laid back. People hang out on the beach where they fish and eat what they catch.
