Plank Road: Costa Brava

Our route from Barcelona to the Costa Brava

This demonstrates just how large Spain is, we are exploring just a tiny corner

As we flew from Zurich to Barcelona, I was glued to the window looking at the Mediterranean coast line. It looked enticing from the air, and it is even more so, now that we are here. This is a rugged coast with a lot of rock, cliffs and pine trees, Costa Brava literally means ‘rugged coast.’ It stretches from the French border to Blanes, which is 60 km north of Barcelona.

In behind this beautiful coast, lies wonderful medieval villages and ruins; there is much to explore here. We are staying in the town of Palafrugell, (Palace of Fruits) this is a market town and a great place to base as we can walk from the town across the countryside to the coast. This was an important manufacturing centre for cork, as the nearby hills have a lot of cork forest, the last cork factory closed in the 1970s.

There is a big street market here on Sunday mornings, but we missed it as we were up very late last night and didn’t get going in time. However, we did get out on a walk through the country and down to a coastal path.

The walk was 12 km and only took a couple of hours as it was more of a sissy walk with no climbing, but it was beautiful. This is the time of the year for us to be here, I cannot image the density of people in the high season. The resort towns are ghost towns right now, which is just great as the coastal path was not very busy. We walked down to Calella de Palafrugell, then along the coast to Llafranc, once in Llafranc, we cut across country back into Palafrugell.

It rained in the night and was cloudy most of the day, but then it cleared off when we were sitting on a bench in Llafranc in front of the beach, doing one of our newly enforced ‘stop and smell the roses’ routines, which we make ourselves do, otherwise, we tend to walk on, like we are on speed.

Masia Roja - Catalan farmhouse, very fortress-like