Detours

The Barcelona Detour

Barcelona's coast and hills both hold better half-days than another hour on Las Ramblas. This route covers a river city, a beach town, and a monastery cut into rock.

8 min read3-4 days, all by train

Barcelona
›Girona
›Sitges
›Montserrat

Barcelona is one of those cities where the temptation is to just stay put, there's enough Gaudi, enough beach, enough tapas bars to fill a week without ever leaving the city limits. But Catalonia's train network makes it almost wasteful not to leave, at least for a day or two at a time. This loop takes in a medieval river town to the north, a beach town to the south with its own separate identity, and a monastery jammed into a mountain that looks, from a distance, like something out of a different story entirely.

Girona, colored houses over a river

Girona's old town sits above the Onyar river, and the postcard image, colorful houses stacked right up to the water's edge, is one of those rare cases where the photo actually undersells the place. Cross into the old quarter and you're in a maze of medieval streets, one of the best preserved Jewish quarters in Europe, and a cathedral with a nave wider than almost any Gothic church in the world.

It's also, for what it's worth, been used as a filming location for a well known fantasy series, which has brought a certain kind of tourist in recent years, but the city absorbs it well and doesn't feel overrun outside a few specific corners.

Trains from Barcelona take under forty minutes on the fast line, which makes Girona one of the easiest possible day trips from the city.

Sitges, the beach town with its own personality

South along the coast, Sitges is a different kind of place altogether, a beach resort town that's long been a haven for artists and, since the 1960s and 70s, a major center of LGBTQ life in Spain. The result is a town that manages to feel both relaxed and lively, with a promenade, a scattering of small museums, and beaches that are genuinely good, better in fact than most of what's directly in Barcelona itself.

It works as a half day trip if you just want the beach, or a full day with time for the old town's whitewashed streets and the church that sits dramatically on a small headland above the water.

Trains from Barcelona Sants take around 35-40 minutes
Beaches get busy in high summer, arrive early if that's your plan
The old town church viewpoint is free and worth the short walk
Sitges hosts a well known film festival each autumn, hotel prices rise accordingly

Montserrat, the mountain monastery

Nothing on this loop looks quite like Montserrat. The mountain itself is strange, a series of rounded rock towers that rise abruptly out of the surrounding plain, and the Benedictine monastery is built into a ledge partway up. A rack railway or cable car carries visitors up from the valley floor, and once you're there, a basilica holds a small wooden statue of the Virgin, a figure of real significance in Catalan religious life.

Beyond the monastery buildings, hiking trails lead further up into the rock formations, and even a short walk out onto one of the ridges gives a view back down over the whole valley that's worth the trip on its own, monastery aside.

It's a longer day than Girona or Sitges, mostly because of the combination of train, then either cable car or rack railway, to actually reach the site, so budget for it accordingly.

Choosing which two to do

If time is tight, most travelers pair Girona with either Sitges or Montserrat rather than all three, since Girona and Montserrat sit in roughly opposite directions from Barcelona and Sitges adds a genuinely different feel. All three are excellent, but three separate rail journeys in three or four days is a reasonable amount of movement, don't feel obligated to squeeze in a fourth.

A loop that shows two sides of Catalonia

What ties this route together is the contrast: a medieval inland town, a coastal resort with its own social history, and a mountain sanctuary, all within roughly an hour of a single city center. Barcelona tends to dominate any conversation about this region, and it deserves to, but this loop is a reminder that Catalonia itself is the bigger and more varied story.