Girona

Home to the Dalí museum, Figueres, his former house in Cadaqués, the Costa Brava, some of Catalonia’s finest restaurants, an inland lake, medieval villages, and of course the extraordinary town of Girona, often described as ‘three times immortal’.

The north-eastern province of Girona is surely the most exciting, the most dynamic and the most satisfyingly varied of all the non-metropolitan areas of Catalonia. The eight cantons that make up the province host no less than twenty music festivals per year, including four with major world-class artists.

Olot and Girona itself share between them Catalonia’s biggest international literary festival, and the Gironese cantons are also home to sixteen starred Michelin restaurants, including the Celler de Can Roca, lunch at which is one of the main incentives used to convince internationally known writers to take part in the aforementioned literary festival.

It is in this corner of Catalonia that you will find Figueres, placed smack in the centre of the Empordà canton across which the notorious north wind, the Tramuntana, blows dangerously hard in the winter, thus accounting - so many Catalans say - for the eccentricity of so many Empordanese, such as Salvador Dalí, responsible for his eponymous museum with its sofa in the form of Mae West’s lips and its car whose ceiling rains; and for his egg-laden castle of Púbol, nearby; and here too, of course, is the Costa Brava which so attracted Marc Chagall, Truman Capote, and Tom Sharpe who all lived there for a while; famed abroad for being a tourist trap, the Costa Brava still has its outposts of beauty, such as medieval-turreted Tossa de Mar, where Ava Gardner and James Mason filmed ‘Pandora’, or Sant Martí d’Empúries, a village so small it takes less than ten minutes to see; and from there it’s a short walk to the adjacent Greek and Roman towns of Empúries; further up the coast are the Empordà marshlands, a protected area, among whose endless reeds you can get completely lost in no time at all; head yet further towards the French border and you come to the bay of Roses, close to which Ferran Adrià started a revolution in Catalan creative cuisine. Creep further up the coast and you find the well-preserved town of Cadaqués, cut off geographically for many years from the inland towns, its isolation now a thing of the past except in the minds of some of its locals; almost touching France is Port de la Selva, a white, friendly, open village, and the summer home of JV Foix, one of Catalonia’s greatest surrealist poets; and, almost touching the border on what is called the Costa Rosada, or Pink Coast - the transition coast between the Costa Brava and the Côte d’Azur - is Port Bou, there where Walter Benjamin committed suicide, thinking he would be caught by the Nazis because the Spanish border guards wouldn’t let him in (it was later discovered they would have).

Girona itself, back in the ‘Eighties, was a gloomy, even a rather grimy place. Spruced up by successive town councils over the following two decades, it is now one of the nicest, busiest and most vibrant towns in Catalonia, something which the tourists discovered some time around the start of the millennium and they now flock every summer to its narrow streets, its abundant restaurants, its much-prized Old Jewish Quarter, and the views of the multi-coloured facades that give onto the river Onyar, visible from any of the towns’ many bridges, including an iron one designed by Gustave Eiffel.

It is in this corner of Catalonia that you will find Figueres, placed smack in the centre of the Empordà canton across which the notorious north wind, the Tramuntana, blows dangerously hard in the winter, thus accounting - so many Catalans say - for the eccentricity of so many Empordanese, such as Salvador Dalí, responsible for his eponymous museum with its sofa in the form of Mae West’s lips and its car whose ceiling rains; and for his egg-laden castle of Púbol, nearby; and here too, of course, is the Costa Brava which so attracted Marc Chagall, Truman Capote, and Tom Sharpe who all lived there for a while; famed abroad for being a tourist trap, the Costa Brava still has its outposts of beauty, such as medieval-turreted Tossa de Mar, where Ava Gardner and James Mason filmed ‘Pandora’, or Sant Martí d’Empúries, a village so small it takes less than ten minutes to see; and from there it’s a short walk to the adjacent Greek and Roman towns of Empúries; further up the coast are the Empordà marshlands, a protected area, among whose endless reeds you can get completely lost in no time at all; head yet further towards the French border and you come to the bay of Roses, close to which Ferran Adrià started a revolution in Catalan creative cuisine. Creep further up the coast and you
find the well-preserved town of Cadaqués, cut off geographically for many years from the inland towns, its isolation now a thing of the past except in the minds of some of its locals; almost touching France is Port de la Selva, a white, friendly, open village, and the summer home of JV Foix, one of Catalonia’s greatest surrealist poets; and, almost touching the border on what is called the Costa Rosada, or Pink Coast - the transition coast between the Costa Brava and the Côte d’Azur - is Port Bou, there where Walter Benjamin committed suicide, thinking he would be caught by the Nazis because the Spanish border guards wouldn’t let him in (it was later discovered they would have).

To the north of the province is the evergreen valley of Núria, over which I once paraglided. This whole area is full of carefully restored villages serving as second homes for wealthy Barcelonans. And at the northernmost tip, straddling the French border, is the steeply inclined town of Puigcerdà and the nearby enclave of Llívia: you reach it by a French road, with all the signs in French, until suddenly you find yourself surrounded by signs in Catalan telling you are back on the ‘Spanish’ side; that entire area of France used to belong administratively and culturally to Catalonia but was handed over to Paris by Madrid in 1659; thanks to the border lines drawn so arbitrarily back then, in some frontier villages there are houses which are officially half in Spain and half in France.

Moving back down towards Girona you pass through the medieval village of Besalú, which used to be a quiet and beautiful place but which has now become something of a boutique venue for tourists, to whom its cafés and restaurants now cater for almost exclusively.

A little further along is the town of Banyoles, whose 10th century main square is always busily buzzing and 23 whose large inland lake (one of only two of its kind on the Iberian Peninsula) can be strolled around in about an hour, giving you plenty of time to watch how the waters shift silkily when tickled by a breeze. When I first stumbled across Banyoles, I knew I’d found my eventual home: I felt that instinctive snap in the head that tells you where to put down your roots. Banyoles is, for me, more than just another interesting town: it has some special ingredient in its make-up that I can’t and probably never will be able to put my finger on. Which is why Banyoles is where I am writing this brief overview of Catalonia.