Introducing La Garrotxa, the little-known Catalonian region with 40 volcanoes
Our first attempt at take-off is less up, up and away than down, over and out. Balloons are always at the mercy of the wind, and an errant gust heaves the giant orb above us way off centre just as our basket is leaving terra firma, tilting it towards the Catalonian grass at a very exciting angle.
When we do get airborne, I grip the wicker with bloodless knuckles as the Vol de Coloms visitor centre shrinks rapidly beneath us. A balloon ride is the only way to appreciate the very particular landscape of La Garrotxa, a sparsely visited region just inland from the Costa Brava that is home to 40 volcanoes.
Our pilot, Toni, points out the neatly cratered cones that nose up from the meadows below, legacies of an explosive history that has been on hold for 11,000 years. It’s a blink of an eye in geological terms, yet most craters are home to a plucky farmhouse or two, and one is boldly graced with a trim little chapel.
Our soundtrack is appropriate: the occasional dragon’s roar of the gas burner above us punctuates the gigantic, eerie silence as that jaunty round shadow far beneath passes over cow pastures and the terracotta patchwork of village roofs. It’s a mesmeric experience, particularly after Toni sends a cava cork flying into eternity and the uncharted effects of pre-breakfast alcohol kick in.
Then we’re brushing the treetops and, through some miraculous feat of advanced balloonsmanship, touching neatly down on a country lane, right next to our waiting support vehicle.
Our après-ballon brunch pays tribute to the rich, red volcanic soil, and a verdant fecundity so pleasingly apparent from the hot-air heavens. La Garrotxa is bean country, so blessed with natural fertiliser and warm moistness that the farmers can usually squeeze in an extra legume harvest.
Every day I ingest beans in some form: faves vinagreta adding a sharp tang to my extremely rare steak at a lively bistro in Girona’s old town, a buttered heap of black-eyed fesols d’ull negres, or, as in this instance, the default comfort food that is Catalonia on a plate.
The first element in butifarra amb mongetes is a fat, peppery sausage or four; the second is a mountain of creamy white kidney beans whose native name means “little nuns”, inspired by pale faces in black habits. I have it three times in five days. Each morning begins with the same breakfast institution – pa amb tomàquet, crusty toast smeared with bisected tomato, olive oil and sea salt, plus a cheeky dab of fresh garlic.
An afternoon ramble through the fields and forests of the Natural Volcanic Park that surrounds Vol de Coloms becomes a tour through the region’s tectonic history. One middle-sized magma hillock has been carved open by a defunct quarry. A mighty wall fashioned from explosively ejected boulders winds away into the trees.
Laid out on an undulating bed of lava-flow “blisters”, la Fageda d’en Jordà is a becalmed realm of spindly beeches, sunlight filtering through the delicate, geometric foliage around me. This is a place of pilgrimage for Catalans, subject of a fabled ode by Joan Maragall, a modernist poet who did much to conserve the language.
It is also a bastion of the Catalan independence movement, which in October last year reached its apotheosis when the Parliament of Catalonia issued a declaration of independence – prompting the Spanish prime minister to dismiss the entire Catalan cabinet, and the international community to reject the claim.
The movement’s flag dangles off every other balcony in La Garrotxa, and I am often reminded that for visitors, a little Catalan – and even less Spanish – goes a long way: “Just a ‘bon dia’ here and there will make you very popular.”
In recent centuries, the fault-lines that run under La Garrotxa have expressed themselves solely through earthquakes – most catastrophically in 1428, when almost every settlement was flattened. Olot, the area’s capital, is a low-key market town that at first glance gives a good impression of having gone very quietly about its business ever since. Only after a long stroll do I notice its peculiarities. Pink and turquoise art nouveau mansions are embellished with dragons, their bay windows held aloft by willowy maidens.
You’re told when to wait or walk at the busiest zebra crossing by an illuminated pair of red and green witches, which I later learn represent the 12ft papier-mâché giants who totter through the streets in an autumn fiesta. Most memorably weird is the Saints Museum, a celebration of the religious statuaries that made Olot’s fortune in the 19th century. Walking alone through a zombie army of life-size plaster martyrs and virgins, it’s difficult to maintain an appropriate expression, particularly as many carry their more fragile accessories – hands, lambs, babies’ heads – in little string bags round their necks. In the basement, craftsmen maintain the tradition behind a viewing window.
A strand of eccentricity seems to run through the region – perhaps because La Garrotxa has been left to its own odd devices, largely ignored by the beach-bound visiting hordes. La Rectoria is a rustic guesthouse with a bijou en suite church, run by an engaging Scottish/Catalan duo, Roy and Goretti.
Over a glass of Goretti’s ratafia – a walnutty digestif made to her own recipe from 63 local herbs and flowers – Roy tells me of the self-taught Catalan piper who turns up to serenade their annual Burns Night gathering. “Huge beard, kilt, sporran, the works. His wife knits Arran jumpers.” A hugely accomplished chef, Roy allows his own foibles to creep on to La Rectoria’s menu: one speciality, blending his past and present, is homemade baked beans.
La Rectoria overlooks the narrow-gauge railway that once delivered plaster saints away from Olot, now repurposed as a cycle path. I borrow a bike and spend a day freewheeling through fern-walled rocky cuttings and over sun-dappled bridges, and down grassy side paths that lead me to lonely, whitewashed chapels and waterfalls.
Then I tootle round a corner and meet a peloton of schoolchildren, acquiring loud and instant familiarity with some of Catalonia’s fruitier phrases during the dusty pile-up. At Sant Feliu de Pallerols, I collect my senses with a glass of Perelada 5 Finques beside the deep river that cleaves the town. A smiling cartoon moon dangles from the bridge: a tribute to locals of old, who were said to while away evenings trying to fish for the moon’s reflection.
“The other towns still call the residents pescallunes, moon fishermen,” Roy tells me that night over slow-braised beef and farro, a polenta made from maize grown in the neighbouring La Vall d’En Bas. “It sounds like they’re being made fun of, but they’ve embraced the tradition. Every May they drop wooden moons off the bridge, and the kids compete to fish them out.”
A drive through the smallholdings takes me to the dark wood and pantiles that is Els Hostalets d’En Bas. Old dears tend geraniums on balconies, chatting to neighbours on the terracotta paving below. Behind them, the town’s little church spire jabs into the heavens; looming all around is a flank of rock-topped rolling green. Gazing down from its hazy brow is the venerable chapel of Sant Miquel de Castelló, target of an expected stroll that’s just been upgraded to a hike.
Reward for an unsightly scrabble is a mighty panorama: bright green bean fields sprawled across the floodplain far beneath, girdled with cork-like walls of rock and the distant, snow-veined Pyrenees. The return loop takes me through pastures of yellow broom and buttercups, my path lined with fragrant flowering thyme. A symphony of crickets and lizard scuttle accompanies me back down to earth; in three hours, the only fellow mammals I encounter have bells round their necks.
Heading on to La Garrotxa’s south-west extremity, the road twitches upwards through the oaks and beeches. The trees part, and a wild and windswept new world opens before me. Cattle graze among house-size, age-smoothed Flintstone boulders, at the rim of an epic canyon circled by vultures. I pull over and walk to the edge: down at the distant fundament, between walls of rock and threads of mist, squirms the Ter, a glittery blue necklace.
Beyond the chasm’s distant opposite flank, ranks of rugged greenery retreat to a hazy horizon. This is the Collsacabra, the “mountain pass of the goats”, and again I have it all to myself. Or very nearly: a few hours later I’m walking with Belinda Parris and her three dogs towards sunset and the village of Tavertet, a gilded clutch of old roofs perched bravely atop the void.
In a while I’ll be under one of those roofs, putting away salted cod, wild mushrooms and slightly too much perelada. But for now, we gaze back at L’Avenc, a fortified medieval mansion that Belinda’s brother Matthew, the diarist and former MP, had chanced upon as a derelict hulk during a hike 30 years before. Restored some way beyond its original 12th-century glory, there it stands on a sheer bluff, that great arched threshold majestic in the last rays: Catalonia’s most magnificent self-catering guesthouse. Its sturdiest, too, as a rare survivor of that 1428 earthquake.
“When you think how many holidays are spent just down there,” says Belinda, waving in the direction of the Costa Brava, “it’s remarkable how few visitors come up here.” We watch her dogs bound down the slab of granite that serves as Tavertet’s main square. “From a commercial perspective, that’s sometimes a frustration. But it does mean when I sit outside L’Avenc and look at that landscape, I’m seeing what the people who built it saw.”
The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold, Tim Moore’s ride down the old Iron Curtain on an East German bike, is published by Vintage at £8.99.
Essentials
Tim Moore stayed at Casa Audouard (from €110/£96 per night for a double room), La Rectoria de Sant Miguel de Pineda (from €80 per night) and L’Avenc de Tavertet (from €120 per night), all booked through Sawday’s (sawdays.co.uk). For more information on Sawday’s suggested volcanic Spain itinerary, see sawdays.co.uk/detour. For hot-air balloon trips, contact Vol de Coloms (0034 972 680 255; voldecoloms.cat).
