Spain · Old Town
Girona
A self-guided walking tour of the Girona Old Town, every street in one day.
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Girona is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
At a glance
Plan your walk.
- Distance
- 12.2 km
- Time
- about 3.5 hours
- Streets
- 91
- Steps
- 25 streets with steps
- Start point
- Catedral de Girona
- Phone needed while walking
- no
- Works offline
- yes
- Expires
- never
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
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.
Eating
Actual food.
Girona is the market town for a province that runs from the sea to volcanic hills, and it eats like one. Anchovies come up from l'Escala, rice and apples from the Empordà plain, small white beans from the volcanic soil round Santa Pau. The Generalitat keeps an inventory of what this land produces, and everything below is in it. The city's own contribution is a pastry. I think that is a fair division of labour.
Meat and fish
Botifarra dolça
A pork sausage made with sugar, grated lemon peel and, at the Empordà butchers, cinnamon. It comes fresh or dried. Fresh, it gets fried, or baked with apple. Nobody can prove how old it is, which I find restful in a sausage.
Sources: Generalitat de Catalunya
Arròs a la cassola
Rice cooked in a wide clay pot, and in this province the rice is often from Pals, on the Empordà coast. Rice has been grown there since at least 1452. It ripens late, and that is said to make it hold up in the pot. Holding up in the pot is the whole job of rice.
Sources: Generalitat de Catalunya, Time Out Barcelona
Anxoves de l'Escala
Anchovies packed in salt in layers and left to mature for about eight months before they are filleted. Tourism closed most of the salting houses on this coast. L'Escala kept going. The register pairs them with roasted vegetables, and I see no reason to overrule a register.
Sources: Generalitat de Catalunya
Vegetarian
Xuixo
Thin laminated dough rolled round custard, fried slowly and rolled in sugar. A Girona pastry shop invented it early in the last century, and pastry shops all over Catalonia copied it. It does not keep, so they fry it every day. That is the pastry's problem, not mine.
Sources: Generalitat de Catalunya
Recuit de drap
Fresh cheese from the Empordà: white, shiny, soft enough to wobble, and it melts on the tongue. Recuit means cooked twice, after the old way of heating the milk. It comes as a pudding with sugar or honey. It does not survive the week, and neither would it around me.
The rennet is usually animal. Ask if that matters to you.
Sources: Generalitat de Catalunya
Brunyols de l'Empordà
Round fritters that puff up but never open a hole, flavoured with aniseed and dusted with sugar. Families used to make them at home for Holy Week. Then the pastry shops took over, and in some towns they now fry them all year. That is the correct number of weeks.
Sources: Generalitat de Catalunya
Vegan
Fesols de Santa Pau
Small white beans grown on the volcanic soil round Santa Pau, up in the Garrotxa. The skin is so thin you barely notice it, and they cook soft and creamy. Farmers there have been selecting these three varieties for three centuries. That is a pace I can work with.
The classic plate comes with torn pork sausage. Ask for the beans with oil instead.
Sources: Generalitat de Catalunya
Poma de Girona
Apples from the Girona counties with a protected name: Golden, Red Delicious, Gala and Granny Smith, and nothing else. Around 1300 a local family put an apple tree in the middle of its coat of arms. The traditional way to eat one here is baked. I eat fruit for a living and I have never made it onto a shield.
Baked apples sometimes get butter. Ask at the counter.
Sources: Generalitat de Catalunya
Oli de l'Empordà
Olive oil from the Empordà, pressed mostly from two local olives, Argudell and Curivell. The north wind here often forces the harvest while the olives are still green. It is fruity and finishes with a little pepper. Have it raw, on bread rubbed with tomato.
Sources: Generalitat de Catalunya
Late breakfast
La Fábrica come for the one thing: the coffee roasted next door
Carrer de la Llebre 3
An old carpenter's workshop on the Carrer de la Llebre, now a cool café with stone walls, opened by a retired pro cyclist and his wife. Toasties, pastries, bagels and breakfast bowls, and the coffee is roasted next door. It calls itself a bike café for everyone, and I have decided that includes rocks.
- Mon09:00–16:00
- Tue09:00–16:00
- Wed09:00–16:00
- Thu09:00–16:00
- Fri09:00–16:00
- Sat09:00–16:00
- Sun09:00–16:00
Sources: Sprudge, Time Out Barcelona
Afternoon coffee
Xocolateria L'Antiga the old one
Plaça del Vi 8
Hot chocolate on the Plaça del Vi since 1916, and the second generation is still pouring it. Order a xocolata desfeta, or a suís under a cap of whipped cream, and dip the melindros. About fifty seats inside and no pretensions at all. A hundred years on one square. I understand that completely.
Sources: Ajuntament de Girona, Fons d'Imatges del Comerç de Catalunya, Time Out Barcelona
Torrons i Gelats Candela come for the one thing: the ice cream
Carrer de l'Argenteria 8
A shop on the Carrer de l'Argenteria that was a pastry shop from about 1930 and has belonged to the Candela family since 1993. Nougat from Xixona in winter, ice cream and orxata in summer. Girona queued here for ice cream long before the franchises came. A house that changes its menu with the season and nothing else has my trust.
Sources: Ajuntament de Girona, Fons d'Imatges del Comerç de Catalunya, Time Out Barcelona
Espresso Mafia where locals go
Carrer de la Cort Reial 5
A cyclist who raced for a living found coffee on the road and opened this on the Carrer de la Cort Reial. White inside, with a wall of beans and coffee kit. They roast their own and ship it as far as Jakarta. Ask for the tasting and the same beans arrive three ways. Everything in the room is white except the coffee, which is the correct way round.
- Mon09:00–19:00
- Tue09:00–19:00
- Wed09:00–19:00
- Thu09:00–19:00
- Fri09:00–20:00
- Sat09:00–20:00
- Sun10:00–16:00
Sources: Sprudge, Ajuntament de Girona
Dinner
Casa Marieta the old one
Plaça de la Independència 5-6
A family eating house on the Plaça de la Independència since 1892, now in its fifth generation. Next door was where the carts and the animals waited on market days. Order the duck with pears or the lamb shoulder, the old Catalan plates the house is known for. The dining room holds a hundred and fifty. Five generations of feeding a market square will do that.
- Mon12:30–15:30, 19:30–22:30
- Tue12:30–15:30, 19:30–22:30
- Wed12:30–15:30, 19:30–22:30
- Thu12:30–15:30, 19:30–22:30
- Fri12:30–15:30, 19:30–22:30
- Sat12:30–15:30, 19:30–22:30
- Sun12:30–15:30, 19:30–22:30
Sources: Ajuntament de Girona, Time Out Barcelona, Associació d'Hostaleria Turisme i Restauració Girona
Dit i Fet come for the one thing: the young Catalan cooking
Carrer dels Calderers 10
Down a narrow lane that runs alongside the Onyar, in the middle of the Barri Vell. The cooking starts from the Catalan recipe book and then gets young and a little daring with it. A meal comes in under thirty five euros, which in a lane this pretty I did not expect.
- Mon09:30–17:00, 19:30–00:30
- Tueclosed
- Wedclosed
- Thu09:30–17:00, 19:30–00:30
- Fri09:30–17:00, 19:30–00:30
- Sat09:30–17:00, 19:30–00:30
- Sun09:30–17:00, 19:30–00:30
The room stays open through the afternoon, but the kitchen only cooks from 13:00 to 15:00 and from 20:00 to 22:30.
Sources: Guía MICHELIN España, Guía Repsol
8de7 where locals go
Carrer de les Hortes 10
A small house on the Carrer de les Hortes, in the Mercadal, across the Onyar from the Barri Vell. The set menu offers three starters and three mains, and you pick one of each. People who live here trust it. Choosing between three is exactly my level of indecision.
- Monclosed
- Tue13:15–16:30, 21:00–00:00
- Wed13:15–16:30, 21:00–00:00
- Thu13:15–16:30, 21:00–00:00
- Fri13:15–16:30, 21:00–00:00
- Sat13:15–16:30, 21:00–00:00
- Sunclosed
Open Tuesday to Saturday only. The kitchen stops at 15:30 at lunch and at 23:00 at night.
Sources: Guía Repsol, Gastro Club Girona
Checked 13 September 2026.
Name origin
Why it is called Girona.
Gerunda. That is what the Romans called the fort they put on this ground, and it is the whole answer. Two thousand years of mouths wore Gerunda down to Girona, a syllable at a time. Nothing here has been chewed on longer, and I include myself.
Sources: www.girona.cat; web2.girona.cat
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
Why then
When the first stone went down.
The first third of the first century BC. Not grown, planted: a brand new town laid out in one go so that it would sit on the road. About two thousand people lived in it, on a regular grid of parallel and perpendicular streets. Walk the Barri Vell today and try to find that grid. Twenty centuries of people building whatever suited them have eaten it.
Sources: patrimoni.gencat.cat; web2.girona.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
The emblem
What the shield means.
This one is not a shield. Girona's arms are four red pales on a gold field, with a small inner shield of silver carrying three red vairs, and a prince's crown over the lot. Official, correct, and unreadable at this size. So the icon is the row of houses standing in the river instead. Their painted fronts are the picture the city puts on everything, and two of the bridges on this walk look straight at them.
Sources: www.girona.cat; www.girona.cat
Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
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
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
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
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- Carrer
- The plain word for a street. Almost every name on this level opens with it, and after an hour you stop reading it at all.
- Pujada
- A climb. Seven streets here are named after the act of going up them: Pujada de la Catedral, Pujada de Sant Feliu, Pujada de Sant Domènec, Pujada de Sant Martí, Pujada del Rei Martí, Pujada de la Mercè and Pujada del Pont de Pedra. Consider that a warning.
- Plaça
- A square, and Placeta is the small edition. Plaça de l'Oli is the oil one, Plaça dels Lledoners is named after hackberry trees, and Plaça de Sant Feliu, Plaça de Sant Pere and Plaça de la Catedral are named after whatever is standing on them.
- -eria, -ers
- The ending that names a trade. Argenteria is the silversmiths, Ferreries Velles the old ironworks, Calderers the cauldron makers, Olles the pots, Mercaders the merchants. Five streets named after containers and the people who beat them into shape. Sound priorities.
- Portal
- A gateway through the wall. Carrer del Portal Nou with its Travessia, and Carrer del Portal de la Barca down by the water. The gates are gone. The names stayed on and now do the job.
- Travessia
- A way across: a short street whose entire job is joining two longer ones. Travessia de l'Auriga and Travessia del Portal Nou, both over before you have decided anything. A Carreró, as in Carreró de la Torre dels Socors, is narrower still. Briefly chewed, still counted.
The size of it
Walk it in a day: Girona in numbers.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 91streets
- 726dots
- 9.9km of street
- 12.2km on foot
- 3.5hours at a stroll
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.