Barcelona To Girona And Beyond

Leaving Barcelona behind, briefly

There's a temptation to treat Barcelona as the whole trip and squeeze everything else into day trips from a single hotel. That works, technically, but it means spending real chunks of each day on trains back and forth rather than actually being in the towns you're visiting.

A better approach, if your schedule allows it, is to base in Barcelona for the city itself, then move north with a bag for a few nights, treating Girona, Besalu, Figueres and Cadaques as their own leg of the trip rather than a series of errands.

Girona's old town

Girona's walled old quarter, with its cathedral staircase and the colorful houses lining the Onyar River, has become more visible in recent years partly through television filming locations, which has brought more visitors without (so far) overwhelming the place. The Jewish Quarter, one of the best preserved in Europe, is a genuine highlight, narrow stone passages that predate most of what's still standing in Barcelona's old town.

Two nights is a comfortable amount of time, enough for the cathedral, the old town walls (walkable, with good views back over the rooftops), and a slower dinner than Barcelona's more tourist-heavy restaurants tend to allow.

Besalu, small but worth the detour

Besalu is genuinely tiny, really a single medieval bridge and a compact old town built around it, but it's one of the best-preserved medieval towns in Catalonia and rarely takes more than half a day to see properly. The fortified bridge, with its angled entrance originally built for defense, is the main image most people come away with.

It works well as a stop between Girona and Figueres, either by a short bus connection or, for travelers with a car for this stretch, an easy detour off the main road.

• The fortified medieval bridge, best seen from the riverbank below
• The old Jewish mikveh, one of the few preserved in Spain
• A short walk through the arcaded main square

Figueres, mostly for one reason

Figueres exists on most itineraries for a single reason: the Dali Theatre-Museum, designed by the artist himself and about as strange and theatrical as you'd expect from that description. It's genuinely worth the stop, and a couple of hours is usually enough unless you're a committed Dali enthusiast.

Beyond the museum, Figueres doesn't ask for much time, which makes it a natural half-day stop on the way toward the coast rather than a place to build a full day around.

Cadaques, the payoff

Cadaques sits at the end of a winding mountain road that historically kept it more isolated than most of the Costa Brava, which is part of why it retains a low-key, white-washed fishing village character even now. Dali lived nearby in Portlligat, and the light along this stretch of coast is often credited as part of what drew him and other artists here.

It's a place to end a route rather than pass through: narrow lanes, a rocky coastline good for swimming rather than sand, and a pace slow enough that after Barcelona's density and Girona and Figueres' more compact stops, it reads as genuine decompression.