Girona

Landmarks

What I would eat first.

Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.

• Catedral de Girona 1,500 points

  The far corner of the walk, and the one I put last on the plate. The square in front is where to stand, not the doorway. From the far side of it the whole west front is in one piece. From the doorway it never is.

• Banys Àrabs 500 points

  Small, easy to miss, off a lane you will already be walking. Do not stop in the first chamber. The thing everybody remembers is one further in, and I am not going to tell you what it is.

• Basilica de Sant Feliu 500 points

  The other big church, down at the north end where the ground finally lets go. Go once round the outside before you go in. Whoever assembled this took what was lying about, and the outside is where that shows.

• Església de Sant Pere de Galligants 500 points

  The far north tip of the level, out past where the Old Town stopped, on the other side of the stream it is named after. It is the only thing on this route that had room to spread sideways, and it used all of it. Look at the front from across the little square.

• Museu d'Història dels Jueus 250 points

  Its door is on the Carrer de la Força, and you will be on the Carrer de la Força whether you plan to be or not. Everything round about is the reason to come. This is the room that explains it. Do the outside first and the inside second: that order matters.

• Pont de les Peixateries Velles 250 points

  One of the crossings, and by a long way the busiest. Go early or go late; around midday you will be queueing for the chance to stand still on it. It is iron, it rings under your feet, and it is the only thing on this level that answers back.

• Pont de Pedra 250 points

  The wide one, the one the whole city crosses without looking. Stop halfway and turn upriver. That row of houses standing in the water, painted every colour anybody had to hand, is the picture that ends up on the postcards, and this is the spot it is taken from.

• Torre de Sant Domenec 250 points

  The east edge of the level, and the only stretch of it where you go along the top of the defences instead of underneath them. Get up at one end and stay up: the ways back down are further apart than you would like. Town on one side, open country on the other.

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

Four rivers arrive here at once: the Onyar, the Güell, the Galligants and the Ter, seventy metres above the sea on the flat of the Pla de Girona. That is why there are so many crossings. The rest of it is the road. This is the narrowest point of the old route over the Pyrenees, which the city itself describes as the last bridge towards Africa and the first boulevard of Europe. Everything travelling between them came past here, and a place where everybody has to slow down is a place where somebody puts out a table.

Sources: www.girona.cat, www.girona.cat, patrimoni.gencat.cat

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.

-100–476

Rome. A town was set down here in the first third of the first century BC, on purpose and in one go, to hold the road. Christianity arrived in the third century. The empire came apart in 476 and the road stayed exactly where it was.

Sources: patrimoni.gencat.cat, www.girona.cat

476–711

The Visigothic kings, for two hundred and thirty-five years. Girona had been a bishop's seat and the head of a diocese since the fifth century and stayed one right through. The rule changed hands. The bishop kept the keys.

Sources: www.girona.cat

711–785

Arab rule. The town came under it in 711 and out of it in 785, seventy-four years later, when the people of Girona gave themselves to Charlemagne. That is the shortest era on this list and the only one the town itself ended.

Sources: www.girona.cat

785–878

The Franks. Charlemagne made a county out of the town, and that county was the first piece of the Marca Hispànica, the belt of land the empire kept between itself and everything south of it. Girona spent ninety-three years as the edge of somebody else's map.

Sources: www.girona.cat

878–1833

Barcelona, and everyone who inherited Barcelona. Count Guifré I joined the two counties in 878, and from then on this town went wherever that one went. What changed here was smaller and more useful: from 1182 Girona was the first city in Catalonia to run a municipal organisation of its own. By 1705, when the rising for Archduke Charles of Austria reached it, the town simply handed itself to him, peacefully, and got on with the afternoon.

Sources: www.girona.cat

1833–

Spain, and a job title. In 1833 Girona was declared capital of the Spanish province that carries its name, and it still is. The city voted in its first democratic municipal elections in 1979, and in 1993, at the third attempt, the University of Girona was founded. Every era above this one took centuries to settle. This one is not finished.

Sources: www.girona.cat

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

1. From 1457 this town chose the jurats who governed it by pulling their names out of a bag. The word for it is insaculació, which is what it says: putting things in a sack. There is a Plaça dels Jurats on your route, named after the ones who came out. I have watched a great many methods of deciding who is in charge. This one is not the worst.

   Sources: www.girona.cat

2. A foundry opened here in 1857 and went on to feed the beginnings of electric light in a long list of Spanish cities. Girona lit its own lanes first, in 1886, ahead of all of them. Catalonia's first continuous-paper mill had already started up here in 1843. The lanes you walk at dusk were the first in the country worth walking at dusk.

   Sources: www.girona.cat

3. Number 2 on the Carrer de Bonaventura Carreras i Peralta is a sixteenth-century town house, heavily made over in the eighteenth, and put back together in 1913 and 1914 by the architect Rafael Masó. The part worth the detour is the yard inside, which joins that street to the Pujada de Sant Domènec: floral sgraffito worked into the plaster, a well with a shield cut into it, and a stone fountain shaped like an animal. It is visible from the gallery on the yard. Most people walk past both entrances without looking in.

   Sources: invarquit.cultura.gencat.cat

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

• 95streets
• 796dots
• 11.2km of street
• 14.3km on foot
• 4.1hours at a stroll