Salt-Tang, Sun-Dazzle, and a Dash of Crowd Control
A weekend wander between Calella de Palafrugell and Llafranc, Costa Brava
I stepped off the bus yesterday morning and straight into a postcard—only nobody had mentioned the fine print about peak-season crowds. English, German, and enough Spaniards to refill La Rambla seemed to have conspired to occupy every square centimetre of sand. The heat was Barcelona-grade—an oven set to “roast” with the fan left on—so any thought of solitude melted faster than my sunscreen.
Yet the first glimpse of the Mediterranean made me forget the human wall: water as transparent as a freshly polished window, glinting turquoise against the jagged, pine-topped cliffs. The secret, I’m told, is the rocky seabed and that coarse, shelly sand; it acts like a giant natural filter, stripping away every last cloud of sediment. The price of that clarity? A bracing dip—noticeably cooler than Sitges—which wakes you up like a triple espresso.
Calella still looks like a fisherman’s village that accidentally stumbled into an Instagram reel: whitewashed façades, terracotta tiles, and tiny coves (Platja del Canadell and Port Bo) stitched together by rock portals. Unfortunately, the photogenic scale equals sardine-can beach density; towel real estate here is brokered with the desperation of Manhattan rentals.
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Restaurants know exactly how to capitalise on this. Prices rise with the tide, which is why the SPAR supermarket, a single block from the water, became my sanctuary. Air-con, cheap 1.5-litre bottles of agua fría, and a baker’s shelf of empanadas meant I could picnic for the price of a seaside coffee. Travel tip: when the Costa Brava wants €4 for a bottle of water, you drop €0.72 at SPAR and toast your savings to the horizon.
By mid-morning, we joined the Camí de Ronda, the old smugglers’ path that now serves hikers and daydreamers. The section between Calella and Llafranc is barely a kilometre, but the views compress a novel’s worth of scenery into half an hour: stone steps switching back under pine boughs, sudden balconies over glassy inlets, and—everywhere—boats bobbing in lazy semaphore.
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