Spain’s Unexpected Coast

There aren’t many places on Earth where you can sit beneath a 12th century notched Gothic wall and gaze out at a merry Mediterranean seascape, but Tossa de Mar, in the heart of Spain’s Costa Brava, is one.

There also aren’t many corners of Spain that will remind you of a Greek island. But waterfront Cadaques, whitewashed and attended by scores of new yachts and old fishing boats, probably will.

And there aren’t many landscapes in Europe that can explain the surreal settings of Salvador Dali’s art. But the stark, sea-lashed and sunbaked headlands of Cabo de Creus, where the artist spent summers as a boy and man, are just such a place.

These scenes are part of the Costa Brava, a sunny stretch of beaches and rocky shoreline that European travelers have favored for years. There are Mediterranean vistas, Greek and Roman ruins, waterfront cafes, medieval hill towns, Catalan language and culture, even a former Jewish ghetto, if you stray a few miles from the coast.

But travelers who are drawn to the bright cultural lights of Barcelona or those leery of summer crowds often overlook this area.

The crowd concerns are legitimate. Since Spain’s beaches emerged in the ‘60s as a favorite, affordable vacation spot for the English and other Europeans, July and August have been rough months in the Costa Brava. Several stretches of the coast--most garishly, the 166-hotel town of Lloret de Mar (permanent population: about 18,000)--have been overtaken by cheap, touristy lodgings and restaurants, which look as if they were built during the same three-week period in 1968. (That was the year Lloret de Mar’s local authorities, eager to make room for more tourism, demolished old Roman fortifications. Now, with cultural tourism on the rise, there’s talk of building a replica.)

But European vacationers are wonderfully predictable. If you reach Catalonia in May or early June, or in September as I did, the pressure is off. Once you’ve taken measure of Barcelona, picked up a rental car and headed north, the Costa Brava can easily fill several days of meandering. After I’d gotten my bearings, I wished I’d budgeted more than five days for this ramble.

Mostly, I wanted more time in Cadaques. But I could have done with a bit more in Gerona, too, and perhaps another day to spend surveying coastline that I could only speed past on this visit.

Heading north from Barcelona--and continuing past the resort zones of Blanes and Lloret de Mar with no regrets--you reach Tossa de Mar in a bit more than an hour.

You also get an introduction to the Catalan language, whose place spellings differ--sometimes slightly, sometimes substantially--from Spanish. (We’ve used many of the Spanish spellings in this story because they will be familiar to many readers.) The Catalans’ strong sense of cultural identity dates to the region’s emergence as an independent country in the 9th century. Since the death in 1975 of Gen. Francisco Franco (who banned the use of Catalan) and the emergence of Spanish democracy since then, the region has gained increasing autonomy and the language has gained enormous ground.

These days you’ll hear plenty of Catalan conversation, especially in the countryside, and as a speaker of crude Spanish, I had no hope of deciphering it. Perhaps because I didn’t look like an imperialist from Madrid, I found locals were happy to help me in Spanish or whatever English they could muster. (Street signs are in both Spanish and Catalan.) On the road, the differences between the place names, thankfully, were never enough to throw me off course.

A t first glance, Tossa de Mar, about 60 miles north of Barcelona, looks like another resort town. But press on past the downscale hotels and tourist shops and soon you arrive at the historic part of town, and the beach.

This certainly is worth an afternoon’s probing. Great stone walls, dating to the 12th century, rise from the half-gravelly beach sand a few steps from the water’s edge, and loom to protect an aged structure that is now the Municipal Museum. You can climb and stand by the notches where archers once stood to defend the old town (once called Vila Vela). The view nowadays (if it’s sunny) is of a few thousand beachgoers splashing and reclining under brightly colored parasols.

A neighboring lighthouse offers similarly great views. And on the inland side of the old wall, the narrow, winding streets of Vila Vela are full of restaurants, which may be touristy but beckoned to me all the same. I took an outdoor table at the Can Pini restaurant along the Portal road, and dawdled through a prosciutto and melon lunch--nothing Catalan about it, I know, but it was the right cool snack for a warm day.

When the time comes to leave Tossa, the scenic way out is GI-682m, also called the Corniche, the 15-mile road north to Sant Feliu de Guixols. It twists and turns above a classic coastal Mediterranean landscape: red tile roofs, cliff-hugging villas, stands of pine and cork trees. The hidden coves and steep scenes at the water’s edge reminded me of a sunnier, warmer Big Sur. The road is two lanes, full of turnouts, and best taken at no more than 25 mph.

A bit farther north lie Sant Feliu de Guixols and then Platja d’Aro, two more resort-like beach areas. I made my base between them at the Hostal de la Gavina, a converted 1920s mansion in the elite neighborhood of S’Agaro. It overlooks the sea, holds membership in the Leading Hotels of the World, and prices itself accordingly. I paid about $150 for a single bedroom with high ceilings and fancy chandelier. A recent eruption of construction to the south has marred the panoramic view from the hotel’s grand pool area, but the clubby public rooms and antique-filled sleeping chambers still make a guest feel privileged. So did the hotel’s Candlelight Grill restaurant, with its courtyard dining area and veal-stuffed mushrooms.

Because the weather is generally mild in spring and fall, the courtyard is a viable option for much of the year. Highs in April and October often reach the 70s.

I bypassed Platja d’Aro (too much talk of discos) and made a brief stop for lunch and a stroll in Pals, a medieval hill town that dates to the 10th century and rises on a hill about three miles inland.

About 20 miles west of Pals, Gerona, population 73,000, is a true departure from the coast. Aside from Barcelona, this is the most urban experience along the Costa Brava, and it’s a healthy counterpoint to its tourism-dependent neighbors. .

It’s pleasant to look through the 12th century ruins that once housed public baths, and to climb the 90 steps to the Sant Feliu Cathedral, built and rebuilt from the 11th to 18th centuries. If you’re up for 200 more steps to the top of its tower, you have the best view in Gerona, a grand vista of red tile roofs of the old town on one side of the Onyar River below, along with the livelier modern architecture of the newer part of town across the river.

Gerona is not quite a postcard town: Laundry flutters from the back windows of apartments stacked up along the river, and there’s a bit of graffiti in the starkly modern Constitution Square. But the oldest parts of town still seem full of mystery, the substantial student population lending it vitality and the pedestrian-dominated Rambla de la Llibertat giving that vitality a stage.

The Jewish quarter, known as the Call district, lies in the shadow of the cathedral and was home to an estimated 1,000 Jews at its peak in the 14th century. Jews had endured there for more than 500 years until Spain expelled them in 1492. Carrer de la Forca, one of the old quarter’s most picturesque streets, was the main artery of the Call. On that street stands the Centre Bonastruc ca Porta, once a synagogue, now an information center and bookstore on the district’s Jewish history.

Most of the lodgings in Gerona are in newer neighborhoods. But with so much of the city’s character embedded in the medieval district, I was determined to stay there, and I wound up making an informal deal with the landlord of a just-completed third-floor apartment nearby. For about $45, I spent a night in a suite with a full kitchen and living room.

Dinner was far more easily achieved. I ate at Boira, a mod restaurant in the handsome colonnade of Independence Square. Arriving at 8:40 p.m., I appeared to be the first customer of the night. The meal: gazpacho with apple and sea bass with fennel. (No main course cost more than $11.) On the sidewalk, lots of young couples, scooters, cigarettes, cell phones--the University of Gerona’s students keep things lively.

About 20 miles northeast of Gerona and 80 miles northeast of Barcelona, a traveler falls into classical history. For the Greeks in the 6th century BC, the name of this settlement was Emporio. For the Romans, 218 BC, it was Emporiae. Now it’s Empuries, a sprawling set of pine-fringed ruins by the sea.

Instead of stopping for an uninspired lunch, I should have headed straight from the ruins to Cadaques, about 110 miles northeast of Barcelona. It lies at the end of a winding, two-lane mountain road, a sequestered location that has protected it from the rapid development elsewhere along the coast.

Once you top the hill and descend into town, you find a wonderfully compact city on the water, with scores of restaurants and shops, a harbor full of brightly colored fishing boats, a skyline of whitewashed buildings and just a handful of hotels, all suffused in pleasing, limpid sunlight reflected from the sea.

In spring, summer and early fall, it’s the sort of place that makes you want to set up an easel and start daubing. And in fact, it had that effect on Pablo Picasso in 1910 (he had come to Catalonia as a boy) and on Salvador Dali a decade later.

This scene is crowded in July and August too. And even in mid-September, the streets of Cadaques (laid out well before the internal combustion engine caught on) were clogged with creeping traffic and darting scooters. There was no real distinction between sidewalk and road or, for that matter, between the two-lane road and the stretches of 1 1/2-lane road, where somebody has to back up if two cars meet.

Still, once I’d parked my car (in an undersized spot on the street) it was grand. I walked everywhere. One night I had a fine seafood medley under the white arches of La Baluard restaurant, with crema Catalan (much like flan) for dessert, then wandered over to listen to folk music and sip a $5 mojito in Cafe La Habana.

Another night I had gazpacho, prosciutto pizza and sangria for $10 at La Gritta on the main square.

As a bonus, I happened on the town during perhaps the happiest days of its year. With the tourist crush just over, the locals celebrate Catalonia Day on Sept. 11, with plenty of activities leading up to it. So while I sat at the outdoor cafes or nosed around for museums, the community was busily mustering itself for fireworks, tugs-of-war, water-balloon fights and some sort of competition requiring women to balance green vases on their heads.

This being a Catalan community, the mustering, for adults and children alike, usually ran late into the night, far too late for me.

Sometimes it didn’t even begin until late. I’ve never felt as old as I did the night I sat for two hours at a waterfront bar, nursing coffees, knowing the big fun was due to start soon, and trying to stay awake until it did. I gave up a bit after midnight and trudged back toward the hotel.

As I went, one family after another seemed to step forward from their front doors, then strike off in the direction I’d just left. Bonfires, dancing, drinking, flirting, the bellowing of folk songs, more drinking--all this, I knew, was to come. From my third-floor balcony, I heard and saw hints of the revelry. But three days after crossing the Atlantic, I just didn’t have it in me to partake.

Similarly, I didn’t enter the fray to get a reservation at El Bulli, the three-Michelin-star restaurant in Roses, a resort town south of Cadaques. But if rarefied dining is at the top of your agenda, El Bulli sounds worthy of some calls well in advance: Chef Ferran Adria is known for his 12-course taster’s menus, which include experimental dishes such as a pea and mint soup served in a shot glass, top layer piping hot, bottom layer deliberately chilly.

I did spend a lot of time wandering around town. One day I ran into Carlos Lozano, who has run an art gallery in Cadaques for 20 years. Lozano grew up in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Silver Lake and attended Belmont High School before heading off to Haight-Ashbury “to be a flower child” and then Europe.

“I met Salvador Dali in Paris in 1969,” Lozano said. “He said he lived here and I should come up. And so I did. There weren’t that many tourists then. You could go and get bread and milk, you know. It was a real village.”

In those days, Lozano recalled fondly, the city was full of contraband smugglers and promiscuous backpackers. And now? It’s still a fine place, Lozano said, but wealthier. Now families from Barcelona arrive each August, paying big money for a month in a villa.

Dali spent many of his summers as a youth in Cadaques. On the wall of the Perrot-Moore museum in town, I found a 1922 oil painting of the beach that neighbors the Hotel Llane Petit. Once his career was launched, Dali built a home just a few miles north in Port Lligat. The Dali foundation offers tours of the egg-topped, three-level dwelling, reservations required. (Spain’s premier Dali museum is in Figueres, where the artist was born, about 20 miles inland from Cadaques.)

I stayed at the Hotel Llane Petit, which had abysmal parking but a priceless waterfront location. All in all, a fair deal for $70. (Next time I’d try the tonier Playa Sol, which has a similar location, 25 yards from the shore.)

Next time I’ll also set aside more time for Cabo de Creus National Park. An hourlong boat ride around the park’s jagged shoreline, which begins just north of Cadaques, and the stark headlands, raked by wind and spattered by sea, left me hungry for a hike. I’ll try that next--during all those extra days I will have set aside in Cadaques.

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GUIDEBOOK

Checking Out the Coast

Getting there: Connecting service from LAX to Barcelona is available on British Airways, Lufthansa, Air France and Delta; round-trip fares start at $1,007.

Where to stay: In S’Agaro, Hostal de la Gavina, telephone 011-34-972-32-11-00, fax 011-34- 972-32-15-73. Opened in 1932, with 72 rooms surrounded by gardens above the sea. Double rooms $145-$250. Closed late October through early March.

In Cadaques, Hotel Playa Sol, 3 Pianc; tel. 011-34-972-25-81- 00, fax 011-34-972-25-80-54, Internet https://www.publintur.es/ guiacata/CBRAVA/CADAQUES/ Hotels/PlayaSol/default.htm. Closed Dec. 12 through Feb. 20. Double rooms $70-$115, depending on view and season.

Where to eat: In S’Agaro, Candlelight Grill (at Hostal de la Gavina; local tel. 972-32-11-00, fax 972-32-15-73). Sophisticated Catalan meals in courtyard setting. Main dishes $13-$30.

In Gerona, Boira (17 Plaza de Independencia, local tel. 972-20- 30-96) has sidewalk tables, indoor tables with river views, and a tapas bar. Modern regional cuisine. Main courses $8-$12.

In Cadaques, Es Baluard, Nemesis Llorens, local tel. 972- 25-81-83, emphasizes Catalan seafood. Main dishes $6-$15.

In Roses, El Bulli (Ap. 30, Cala Montjoi; local tel. 972-15-04-57, fax 972-15-07-17, Internet https:// www.elbulli.com) is a 14-mile drive south of Cadaques. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays in April, May and June, closed seasonally from Oct. 1 through March 28. Chef’s tasting menu about $110.

For more information: Tourist Office of Spain, 8383 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 960, Beverly Hills, CA 90211; tel. (323) 658-7188, fax (323) 658-1061, Internet https:// www.okspain.org.