I spent the quietest Christmas of my life in the city of Tarragona soon after the year 2000; it was just my mother and myself in that low season. One by one we visited the sights or rather sites, as most of the things to visit are mainly open air Roman remains: the amphitheatre, the aqueduct, the quarry, the town walls, the forum, and last but by no means least, the History Museum, which is also chock full of Roman bits and pieces. This abundance of Roman stone is because after the Romans had inflated the original Iberian settlement into a city, they then made what they called Tarraco into the capital of two thirds of the Iberian peninsula. For hundreds of years, then, Tarragona was far, far more important than Barcelona.

The first thing you find out about Tarragona once you get there is that it is divided by a very long - indeed, seemingly endless - street called the Rambla Nova, which comes to a halt at a famous wrought iron balcony that gives on to the sea and a section of pre-beach paving on which lovers write amorous graffiti in different languages (Catalan, French, Spanish and Portuguese, the last time I looked). If you stand at the balcony and walk left, you hit the old town: quaint, yellow-brown and steep.

And if you go there on the first weekend of October, you’ll see why Tarragona is also known in Catalonia as the ‘capital dels castells’, that is to say, the capital of the human towers, a Catalan sport dating from the 17th century in which men and women and children climb over each other to form pillars of flesh that require plenty of training and sometimes reach astonishing heights. Almost every major town in the country has at least one human tower team, and all of them descend on Tarragona for the biannual Human Tower Competition (‘Concurs de Castells’) which several TV documentaries have made internationally famous.

Tarragona province, on the other hand, is full of highly heterogeneous towns and villages. Take the little coastal village of Altafulla, for example, the sea-bound part of which is much like any other Mediterranean resort, but when you cross the tracks you find yourself in an unexpectedly well-preserved medieval town. Further south you come to Salou, which for years has been the booze-up resort of choice for students from all over Europe; a place in which one entire sector of the town is given over to bars, discotheques, hotels and restaurants in which you will barely hear a syllable of Catalan or Spanish, the barmen and waiters being mainly English, Dutch and German. I spent an entire day in Salou without ever being further than a thirty second stroll from a pub. But if you head further south, things get more interesting.

On the Ebre (Ebro, in Spanish) river there is the town of Tortosa, for instance, which has a curiously attractive, run- down, lazy feel to it and is well worth exploring. It also has
– smack in the middle of the river – one of Catalonia's last Francoist monuments, an iron spire dedicated to the 'Glorious fighters of the battle of the Ebro' (a reference to the Fascist troops, who won). Looking like a huge scorched tin opener, it remains the source of fierce debate in Tortosa itself, some of whose citizens regard it as part and parcel of their town, whereas others would happily semtex it to smithereens.

Following the river Ebre down to the sea you come to its delta, a Natural Park that consists of vast stretches of sand and narrow paths surrounded by equally vast rice paddies. It's like wandering (or cycling, if you wish) through a fertile moonscape, dotted here and there with varied flocks of birds: nearly a hundred different species nest here. Unsurprisingly, given that the rice produced on the delta is some of the finest in Europe, most of the restaurants in Tarragona province serve al least a few rice dishes and some serve only serve rice dishes, which the locals call 'arrossos', and the tourists, 'paellas'.

Inland, it would be inadvisable to miss Miravet, with its perfect cube of a Templar castle tucked into a bend in the river; or Reus, the birthplace of Antoni Gaudí - an audio-visual museum there is dedicated to him and his work - which has a central square consisting entirely, and agreeably, of Art Deco buildings; Valls is the best place in Catalonia for eating 'calçots', a long thin onion which is dipped first into a nut and tomato based sauce called 'romesco' and then dipped straight into the diner's mouth, (obligatory bibs are handed out beforehand); ever so close to Valls is the untouristy yet pretty-as-a-picture medieval town of Montblanc, with an excellent, traditional, family-run restaurant called Cal Colom where there are no printed menus and the day's fare is recited to you on the spot.

Finally, anyone not averse to a spot of wine should go straight to two towns in the west of the province - Gandesa and Falset - which back in the 'Eighties were almost as dead as dodos and are now thriving, prosperous places, thanks to dedicated specialisation for over two decades in high quality wines.
The latter is the smallest capital of any Catalan canton, with a population of just 2,000 people. This canton is called El Priorat, and its wines have become famous among those who can afford them, the best fetching prices of up to €700 a bottle. Gandesa, on the other hand, is the capital of the Terra Alta canton, whose wines, like those of El Priorat, also sport a Denominació d'Origen, which is a high quality classification similar to the French 'Apellations Controlées'.

There are many other things, places and people of interest in the province of Tarragona, but perhaps there is no better way of ending this thousand-word glance at it than on a terrace in Gandesa or Falset, with a glass of (really good) wine within easy reach.