Puerto de Sagunto market adds refrigerated lockers from October
Sagunto City Council will install refrigerated lockers at the Municipal Market of Puerto de Sagunto so customers can collect their shopping at any time, through a Click&Collect service starting on 1 October.
Shopping at the Municipal Market of Puerto de Sagunto (coastal district) will no longer depend on the stalls' opening hours from 1 October. That day, a block of refrigerated lockers goes into service on the side of the building facing Calle del Trovador, designed for anyone who orders fresh produce during the day but can only come to collect it late in the evening, or even overnight.
This is not the council's first attempt at the idea. Exactly a year earlier, in September 2025, it installed an equivalent system at the market in Sagunto's historic centre, and it was precisely the good response from customers at that first location that convinced the council to repeat the experience now in the coastal district.
What sets these lockers apart from a simple parcel locker is temperature control: fish, meat and vegetables reach the buyer in good condition even if several hours have passed since the seller placed the order inside. Without that refrigeration, an order of fresh produce could not wait that long without spoiling, so the cold-chain guarantee is what makes it possible to extend pickup hours beyond the market's closing time.
The mechanism behind the service is the same one many online shops already use under the name Click&Collect: first the customer agrees with the stallholder what to buy, then the seller prepares the order and stores it in one of the lockers, and finally the buyer decides when to collect it, without being tied to the market's clock. Collecting itself comes down to three steps: identify yourself as a customer on the screen next to the lockers, enter the order number and confirm; from there, the system itself opens the right door and shows how many deliveries remain until the whole order is complete. No app or prior sign-up is needed.
Natalia Antonino, the councillor responsible for Commerce and Markets (Concejalía de Comercio y Mercados), presents the new service as a complement rather than a replacement for what already works well at the markets: direct contact with stallholders and the quality of locally sourced produce. Her department frames the lockers as one more piece of a broader plan to modernise the offer of municipally run markets and make daily work easier for the traders who sell there.
Among the traders themselves, represented by the Puerto de Sagunto Market Vendors' Association, the reception has been positive: they value that the system opens the door to customers with split shifts, those caring for dependants, or simply anyone whose working day does not match the market's usual hours. Several stalls inside the market expect that extra flexibility to eventually bring in shoppers who previously missed out by arriving too late.
Puerto de Sagunto accounts for much of the municipality's industrial and port-related employment, with shift patterns that often clash with the logic of a traditional morning market, unlike the historic centre, where the system was tried first and where the commercial rhythm is different. The round-the-clock availability of the lockers responds directly to that local working reality, rather than being a purely technological add-on.
The lockers' arrival in Puerto de Sagunto is not an isolated case, but the continuation of a municipal plan to digitise markets that, according to the council, will keep expanding gradually to other commercial spaces across the town as results justify it. Neither the cost of the installation nor any timeline for extending it to other municipal facilities has been detailed for now.
With two markets, the historic centre and the Puerto, now running under the same out-of-hours pickup model, the council has a double test bed to gauge real demand for these lockers before deciding whether the system reaches other municipal facilities too. According to aytosagunto.es, with additional information from elperiodic.com.