One question kept popping into my head while the rental car crept in bumper-to-bumper traffic along the Mediterranean some 60 miles east of Barcelona: Is this really worth it?
My romantic notions about the charms of a Spanish countryside drive were suddenly undergoing severe stress. These notions had been formed 25 years ago by a friend who glowingly recommended experiencing Spain by car. “It is so unspoiled,” he said. “You will love it. You will see the real Spain.”
True, a quarter century had passed since that tip and, true, I had chosen a coastal route through the Catalonia region of Spain that served as a magnet for people, foreign and domestic, and perhaps not typical of the real Spain. But never did I expect to get caught in what resembled a rush-hour tieup along the Kennedy Expressway. My wife and I had chosen an ambitious three-day itinerary in the coastal area that eventually would put nearly 600 miles on our car, including negotiation of the bustling streets of Barcelona.
The road, the N-11, had in the first hour or so yielded only glimpses of scenic distinction as we drove from Barcelona toward the Pyrennes. Railroad tracks ran between the highway and the sea, making for a more picturesque train ride than one by automobile. The red clay hills in the background, the majestic palm trees and large cacti spiced up a slow journey through overdeveloped, overcrowded seaside towns.
We did not stop as we rolled past Vilassar, Cabrils, Mataro and Caldes d’Estiac on our way to Girona, an inland town in the heart of Catalonia with stunning Roman ruins. But before bedding down, I wanted to see the Costa Brava, the mountainous region along the coast everyone recommended.
To do so, we had to leave the N-11 near the town of Blanes to remain on the road next to the Mediterranean, but we quickly encountered even longer traffic tieups. After inching our way through Blanes, the traffic jam suddenly disappeared. And the landscape soon went from bland to dramatic. This was the gateway to the Costa Brava (“rugged coast”). As we climbed and spun around hairpin turns in the hills, we looked down upon a rugged coastline stretching at some points as far as the eye could see.
Developers had accommodated to the terrain. Hotels, villas and condos seemed to be suspended from the hillsides, held up by some magical force. Cyclists whipped down the mountainside in high spirits. And at a scenic outlook, the seaside town of Tossa de Mar, bustling with tourists on a beachfront that extended out to a point, put on such a fetching pose from my high vantage point that I exclaimed: “This is really worth it.”
There were more such scenic delights in our three-day trek through the region. This was not nearly enough time to take full measure of the attractions and visit all the picturesque seacoast towns.
Driving around the mountain curves naturally takes some skill, but it helps if you grew up in Kentucky and have some experience with hairpin turns. This road can get jammed up with truck traffic, too, but we were lucky in that regard this day. Perhaps it was because we were there just before high season, even though the sun was bright and the temperature was in the 70s. In summer, the Spaniards say, the Costa Brava road is often a parking lot.
We might have avoided some traffic by driving straight to Girona from Barcelona on the four-lane toll road, the autopista, before heading to the coast. The autopista is expensive in Spain — it cost $7 to drive 75 miles. Gasoline also is dear; putting in three-quarters of a tank added up to $30.
Renting a car in Spain is an expensive proposition for many foreigners. With my long legs and tall frame, I did not fit well in the smaller, cheaper models that looked like tin cans to me. At the same time, these small cars do come in handy in towns where the streets are so narrow you need a microscope to measure clearances and some effort to turn corners.
Since I never learned the stick shift well enough to feel comfortable at it, I opted for automatic, which added another $100 to the weekly rental rate. Then there is the matter of insurance. My auto insurance in the states did not cover me at all overseas, so I was forced to spend another $200 or so just on insurance.
Usually I am relaxed driving, but something in one of the guidebooks caught my eye before I left and nagged at me constantly. If you get into an accident with a Spaniard, it said, the chances are you will be found guilty and fined, no matter who is at fault. There was another disquieting piece of advice in the guidebooks. If a Spaniard is on your tail and the light is beginning to turn from yellow to red, it said, don’t hesitate if you want to avoid a rear-end collision.
Luckily, neither of these happened. But I can report that Spaniards as a whole are aggressive drivers who grow impatient with slowpokes, but I don’t know that I would set them apart from other Europeans or many Americans for that matter. While it may not be true in other areas, I did not find them so insouciant about the red light. Indeed, in Barcelona, which is not a fun city to drive in, they seemed to respect red lights more than Americans do.
But keeping a rental car in Barcelona is impractical. You have to pay for parking, the street signs are hard to see, and even if they do respect red lights, they do drive with the kind of abandon you might see in rush hour on the Kennedy.
The most intimidating drivers are those on motorcycles and motorbikes. They are ubiquitous and they are fearless, and it is best to let them have their way without getting upset. We found that the roundabouts, common in Spain, are centers of driving anarchy. I was never certain about the right of way, so I was extra cautious when I approached one.
I picked up our car at the Barcelona train station from Europcar. They spoke English well, but they didn’t offer a map until I asked. And only later did I learn that the map lacked some important details, such as the town where we ultimately stayed. The station is a beehive and a bit of a hike from the city’s main activity.
A warning on the seat of the car said that thieves were operating in the area of the train station. Their modus operandi was to flatten your tire while you waited for a light, then rob you while pretending to help you. If such a thing happened, you were not to get out of the car and drive to the nearest police station or garage, flat or no flat. Very comforting beginning, it was.
But along the Costa Brava on the first day of our trip, the beauty erased all such fears. At Sant Feliu de Guixols, a crowded upscale resort on the coast, we headed inland toward Girona. We were to stay at the Hostal de la Gavina in Girona, according to our travel agent, but we had not taken the time to pinpoint it.
After driving through the town for a half hour, we finally stopped at a hotel to ask where this elusive place was. Oh, she said, it is on the coast, next to Sant Feliu de Guixols, at S’Agaro. Then, she informed me, the entire region is also called Girona.
A car gives you independence and freedom on a journey like this, compensating for our own lack of research on the place we were to stay and our travel agent’s mistaken impression that we were to spend the night in Girona. This taught us an important lesson to seek directions well in advance and get precise locations when we go on another such drive. It would also have been profitable to obtain city maps and area maps at home, either through the Spanish embassy or the Internet.
Finally, late in the afternoon, after driving some 150 miles, we arrived at our first-day destination. The Hostal de la Gavina (named after a seagull) is a stunning facility in the Grand European style, overlooking the Mediterranean and listed as one of the great hotels of the world. Lucky for us that we got in just before high season. Though it has every conceivable feature, including superb food, the real highlight is a 30-minute walk around the point. The path has been built up on the rocks of the sea. In spring, wisteria blooms everywhere.
Eager for some Catalan food on the first night, we took the hotel concierge’s recommendation and drove to a country restaurant called Les Panolles near St. Cristina d’Aro and, despite prices worthy of those back in Washington, D.C., where we live, found that the seafood lived up to the billing. Sea bass cooked in foil with tomatoes and Catalan spices proved a wonderful grace note to a busy day. We were proud of ourselves that we had exercised our independence and gotten off the beaten tourist track. (Note: Here you could not add the tip to your credit card bill after they had gone through the approval process.)
With our hotel as the base, we launched our second day with sightseeing and shopping on our minds. Specifically, we were in the market for some Spanish tile for our kitchen. We first drove to the bustling coastal town of Palamos, just 5 miles away, and stopped in a store that sold pottery. Go to La Bisbal, they said, just 15 miles down the road. The owner drew us a map.
Spanish people in the country are extremely tolerant of tourists, especially Americans who have little knowledge of the language except for a few halting phrases. When I asked directions with a donde here or a como there and they could see I wasn’t comprehending their precise instructions, they would grab a pen and paper and draw a rude map for me. They seemed pleased to help.
La Bisbal d’Emporda is clearly the ceramics capital of the Girona region. Its factories churn out pottery, tile and other decorative ceramics for store after store that line the main street of the small town. Some of this tile is sold throughout Spain.
On Easter eve when we visited, the town was teeming with Spanish people shopping for these ceramics. It took on a festive air, and one had to be careful driving through the narrow streets to avoid people crossing from one store to another. For the most part, except for the eateries that interrupt the collection of ceramics shops, it seems a one-industry town.
My wife and I settled on some hand-painted tile of winemaking scenes that we wanted to use as spot decorations in our kitchen. We paid nearly $60 for 30 pieces. Later, back at home, we learned that this price was extremely reasonable and that we could have made a mint reselling it in the U.S.
I was tempted, since I am a native of the state, to dine at a place in downtown La Bisbal called Kentucky. The owners had a symbol out front of a horse with a horseshoe surrounding its head to give diners a sense of the state. But inside the images were definitely un-Kentucky. A picture of a young Clint Eastwood from one of his Westerns and a poster of a soccer team were on the wall. Spanish people apparently love using American names.
We didn’t stop at a restaurant called Cincinnati, in downtown Palamos on the coast, but the old German town along the Ohio River would certainly be surprised to see its name so prominently used on the Spanish Costa Brava.
That second evening, we drove for a good hour trying to find a restaurant in the town of Palafrugell near La Bisbal. Frustrated, we picked a restaurant — La Tina — on the highway back to our hotel with lots of cars parked our front. It was a family restaurant with lots of noise and lots of food at a reasonable ($6 for the menu of the day) price. The fish soup was especially good.
The Hostal de la Gavina is so nice it was hard to leave it, so we did not leave until noon on the final day of our trip. To top off the trip, I wanted to see the fishing village of Cadaques, one of the closest towns to France and some 60 miles away from our hotel, then drive to Figueres and finally back to Barcelona at the end of the day, nearly 175 miles plus another 25 of driving around in towns. It was a lot of driving to mix in with sightseeing.
Along the way to Cadaques, we encountered some of the most treacherous, though beautiful, roads of all. Much of it was inland, but after we drove past the town of Roses and snaked our way up to the top of the mountain, the blue Mediterranean shone beyond the hills and the snow-capped Pyrennes rose to our left in the distance.
The white buildings of the village sparkled below, and the real Spain beckoned. But as soon as we came into town, it was apparent that we did not want to stay for long, so crammed was it with people. Not a parking space was in sight.
Some charm is lost in the mass discovery of an unspoiled spot.
Figueres, home of Salvador Dali and his unusual museum, is certainly not unspoiled, but the museum is such a delight that no one who visits the region should miss it. With its narrow streets and busy shops, the town also is filled with charm.
The Dali museum is more than merely a building housing many of his works. It is a piece of art itself, a reconstructed lyric auditorium rebuilt under the close supervision of the famed surrealist. Here, in his home town, his fantastic self-styled “paranoiac-critical” visions that shocked the art world in his day draw people from around the world. You know you are in a different kind of museum that displays a Cadillac convertible with a life-sized statue of a buxom woman on the hood.
Clocks fly and melt. Dali shows us his preoccupation with sex and his iconoclastic view of the prevailing world of art. And his humor shows in creating a vision of Mae West that takes an entire room, with a sofa serving as her lips and paintings of Paris as her eyes. This piece of art is real gimmick, as are several others in the museum, and it has to be viewed through a reductive lens at the far side of the room.
My wife and I wanted to spend a good half day touring the museum, but as it turned out we had only about a hour before it closed. It became clear that we had rushed ourselves on the final day and should have planned our trip better to enjoy it more. We missed some of the coastal areas we wanted to see closer to the French border. And the old Roman ruins in Girona remain for us to see on another trip.
To see the Costa Brava on a more relaxed basis, you need four or five days at the least. I had wanted to drive to the very edge of the Pyrennes, but simply ran out of time. If seeing everything is your goal, you should try to stay in more than one hotel and make your drive a progressive one. We began our visit to Spain by touring Barcelona for three days, then drove for three days before returning to Barcelona for another three days. In retrospect, I would have given us one more day on the road.
Before we entered Figueres, we stopped on a whim at the crossroads town of Villa Sacra to dine at the Restaurant Cal Pastoret, a little family place with a stuffed boar’s head on the wall (and a child’s pacifier stuck on one of its teeth). But our meal was delicious: Wine, two courses (including paella), dessert and coffee came to less than $7 each. And the staff was extremely friendly and tolerant of our unfamiliarity with the language.
We had finally found the real Spain.
IF YOU GO
GETTING THERE
There are no non-stop flights from Chicago to Barcelona. Air France (800-237-2747) connects through Paris; British Airways (800-AIRWAYS) through London; Iberia (800-772-4642) through Madrid; and Sabena (800-955-2000) through Brussels.
LODGING
Gran Hotel Catalonia, 142-146 Balmes, Barcelona. Rates start at about $220 per room per night double occupancy in mid-April. Contact Utell International, 800-448-8355; www.hotelbook.com.
Hostal de la Gavina, 17248-S’Agaro, Costa Brava, Spain. Rates start at about $150 per room per night double occupancy in mid-April. Contact Leading Hotels of the World, 800-223-6800; www.lhw.com.
DINING
Les Panolles is about a mile from Sant Cristina, which is 30 minutes from S’Agaro. Dinner for two was about $78, including sea bass served with tomato sauce, salad, soup, dessert and coffee.
CAR RENTAL
Our weekly rate was $434 for a mid-sized car, which included an extra $100 for automatic transmission. There was an additional $200 charge for insurance because my stateside policy did not cover driving in Spain. We rented through Europcar. Other companies that rent cars in Spain include Alamo, Auto Europe, Avis, Budget, Hertz, National, Thrifty and Kemwel. (For more on car rentals overseas, see Page 12.)
INFORMATION
Contact the Tourist Office of Spain, 845 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 915 East, Chicago, IL 60611; 312-642-1992; www.okspain.org.
ROBBED AT THE SUBWAY
BARCELONA — I was robbed.
Most shops were closed, traffic was sparse, and the sidewalks largely empty. The day after Easter was warm and bright, and the city’s sparkling architectural sights beckoned.
I consider myself street smart and cautious about lurking thieves, but for some reason on this day I left behind my natural instincts. I dressed too much like a tourist and, though I had my passport and traveler’s checks secretly stashed away on my belt, I put my wallet in a front pocket. It was easily visible to the trained eye.
Brimming over with the hubris of a traveler who been around the city for a few days, I decided to try the subway. My wife and I lingered at the ticket machine for a bit and stopped to notice some architecture. By now, we were sitting ducks. When I went through the turnstile, a young man came from behind and grabbed my arm, ostensibly to help me with the ticket while an accomplice went for my wallet.
Instantly I knew what was happening, but I didn’t respond quickly enough. Then I yelled and turned, and ran after them. I did this from instinct, not intelligence, but it had one effect. They threw my wallet to the ground. They had taken all my currency and an Amtrak ticket, but the credit cards and other IDs were still intact.
Shaken, we asked the metro employee behind the window to call the police, but she refused and told us to go to the nearest police station. She got angry when we persisted, but still didn’t help.
At the police station, I filled out a report, but no one could speak English and the police form was all in Spanish. I called the hotel and asked the concierge to translate. That helped, but all the police wanted was a report.
They did not ask for descriptions and seemed rather relaxed about the whole thing. This was definitely not Rudy Guiliani’s New York.
But I take full responsibility for the incident. I was careless in how I dressed and where I put my wallet. I am as angry at myself as I am at the two guys who got away.
— William Neikirk
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William Neikirk’s e-mail address is wneikirk@tribune.com.
