Plank Road: Walking the Costa Brava

There is a big storm hitting northern Spain, the accumulation of rain may result in flooding. As much as we are pining to travel to the Basque Country and the remainder of northern Spain on the Atlantic, wet weather is why we won’t do it in the winter months. This storm is to drop 1 - 3 feet of snow on the French Alps as well. We have been watching the radar, the Pyrenees seem to split the storms so that the Costa Brava is spared. That is to change on Sunday when the forecast is for unsettled conditions.

With all of that in mind, we decided to walk hard and to walk long today, getting in as much of this terrific coast as we can. We started out right from our apartment today, across the farmland and into the woodland. Heading north, we stayed inland and then dropped down to the small seaside resort of Tamariu.

Tamariu has a really nice beach which is hemmed in on both sides with rocks and cliffs. It was around noon or so when we got here, as such, there were only a few people around. You have to keep in mind that the people here do not eat lunch until later in the day, and we don’t eat lunch at all, so the timing of lunch service has no bearing on us. We sat on a bench in front of the beach to decide if we should continue on north to another beach or follow the guidebook and turn back south to continue with the walk. We decided to go for the next beach, so we headed up out of town to the north on the road.

After a while the GR 92 path left the road and entered the woodland. When we reached an area of vacant holiday homes, there was an option to take a trail up to a Ses Falugues, up the cliff. Since we are slaves to a view, we headed up to get a better view of the sea. This is where you can see the holiday homes clinging to the cliffs with views to the Mediterranean.

We came back down the cliff and then had to take a fairly steep paved road down to Aiguablava. Aiguablava means blue water and this beach is astonishingly beautiful. There were a few people floating round and one hardy woman started trotting back and forth along the beach in swimming gear and then she took to the water and was swimming in the little bay. We thought the conditions would be rather cool, but she swam like a fish.

The colour of the water is extraordinary, it was not possible to capture the colour until we walked up the stone path toward the Parador. A Parador is usually a historic building that the Spanish government has bought and turned into a hotel, they are all over Spain. We have never stayed in one, but supposedly, they are not priced out of the range of the average person and they tend to be situated in places with good views.

We walked up to the Parador to see if we could get good views, so we circumnavigated the hotel and quickly debated if it was in good form or not, to walk through the area of outdoor diners so we could get to the other side. Once some other people came walking by the pool and straight through the outdoor patio, we decided we could trudge through. I snuck a look at one woman’s plate and saw some lovely looking Iberian ham.

We walked back down to Aiguablava and then walked back up the steep road, then into the woods and back to Tamariu. Tamariu had come alive as it was time for lunch, the outdoor patio across the promenade was packed with sensible people sitting in the sun in a wonderful setting by the sea, enjoying lunch.

We headed up the steps from the beach and entered a path through some fantastic coastal landscape with lots of rocks. The path then headed very steeply down a cliff face with wood railings the whole way to a pebbly beach, known as Cala Pedrosa. After leaving Cala Pedrosa we were back into the woods and had to turn inland as the coast was no longer negotiable on foot.

We only met a few people on the paths, it is only when we got to some type of resort or historic site with a hotel and restaurant that we encountered people wandering in non sensible footwear. The locals wear really fine shoes and boots, well, their entire wardrobe is splendid.

We walked up to Sant Sebastia, a fifteenth century watchtower and chapel. There is a hotel and restaurant there as well, with people having drinks and dining and enjoying the views. The Llafranc lighthouse is up there as well, we can see its beam of light at night from our apartment window.

There are steps from the lighthouse down to Llafranc, which we were going to take down but they appear to be rebuilding the steps and the route was closed off. Just as well, as this forced us to take the shorter route home across country to Palafrugell. Interestingly, the streets just down from the lighthouse are named after countries in the New World that were conquered by both the Spanish and the Portugese. Quite a few Catalans went to the New World to make their fortune and then returned to Catalunya, they were referred to as Indianos. They tended to build colonial style homes with a palm tree in the front, they also funded public buildings, there are festivals in Catalunya related to the Indianos.

We were pretty knackered by the time we got home as the walk took us just over six hours, we put in a lot of km, but we don’t know how many and we don’t want to know. We do know one thing, the cava is tasting extra good tonight.

Tamariu beach