Villages

The villages of the Costa Brava

From Portbou to Sant Feliu de Guíxols: every village with its own character.

Baix Empordà

Begur

Begur sits a little inland, and that one fact explains almost everything else. It isn't a town built beside the water but on a hill above it, with the Mediterranean laid out below: while other Costa Brava towns grew up around a harbor, Begur grew up around a castle, and the calas came later. So nobody here asks which is the beach — they ask which cala you're going down to today. Sa Tuna, Sa Riera, Aiguablava, Platja Fonda, Fornells, Aiguafreda, Illa Roja: a string of small bays linked by the Camí de Ronda, the coastal footpath, each with its own temperament. And behind all of them sits an old quarter of Indiano mansions, quiet squares and cobbled streets that remember something easy to forget now — before it became one of the most coveted places on the Costa Brava, Begur looked west toward Cuba more than east toward Barcelona.

Alt Empordà

Cadaqués

Cadaqués is the most photographed town on the Costa Brava, and the hardest to actually get to know. White houses, green shutters, boats drawn up facing the sea, the light that undid Dalí — it's all over every postcard, and none of it explains why people keep coming back. Maybe it has to do with the winding road that kept the town cut off from the rest of the Empordà for centuries, or with that light, which changes by the hour and makes the place feel like somewhere new each morning, noon and evening. You don't come here for wide sandy beaches or a promenade lined with shops. You come to walk slowly, to lose yourself in slate-paved streets, to watch the sea from the rocks, and to understand why this corner of the coast ended up gathering some of the twentieth century's most important artists.

Baix Empordà

Calella de Palafrugell

Calella de Palafrugell is probably the most recognizable image of the whole Costa Brava. White houses, les Voltes of Port Bo, boats drawn up on the sand, the Mediterranean woven into the town's daily life — it turns up in thousands of photographs every summer. And yet that postcard only tells part of the story: the real Calella shows itself once you step a few meters off the main promenade, walk the Camí de Ronda without hurrying, or come back at dusk, when the terraces start to empty and the town settles back into the unhurried pace it always kept. Because before it became one of the great icons of the Mediterranean, Calella was — and still is — a fishing village.

Alt Empordà

Empuriabrava

Empuriabrava doesn't look like anywhere else on the Costa Brava, and it isn't trying to. While every other town here grew slowly around a fishing harbor, this one started on a drawing board: in the late 1960s, the old marshland at the mouth of the Muga river was turned into a town built entirely around water, with more than 24 kilometers of navigable canals, thousands of private moorings, and the largest residential marina in Europe. It could easily read as artificial, but spend a day here and the appeal becomes obvious: where other towns park the car, this one moors the boat. And while one half of the town lives with its eyes on the canals, a few meters away begin the Aiguamolls de l'Empordà, a wetland landscape where flamingos, herons and storks take to the air. Engineering and nature rarely sit together this comfortably.

Baix Empordà

Llafranc

Llafranc has never needed to raise its voice. It has none of Calella's Voltes, none of Begur's Indiano mansions, none of Tossa's walls, and yet there's something here that keeps drawing people back, year after year. Maybe it's the perfectly sheltered bay, the small marina, the seafront promenade, or the way the town has managed to grow without losing its poise. Here the Costa Brava changes rhythm: breakfast with the boats in view, a walk up to the lighthouse, a swim in a hidden cala, and the rest of the day happening without much of a plan at all. Llafranc isn't a town for rushing between places. It's one of those places where the greatest luxury is simply staying a little longer.

Baix Empordà

Palamós

Some towns live facing the sea. Palamós still lives off it. While most of the Costa Brava turned its harbors into leisure marinas, here the boats still come back every evening loaded with fish, the auction house still opens for business, and the restaurants still wait on the day's catch: the harbor keeps setting the town's rhythm the way it has for centuries. But walk a few minutes north and you find another Costa Brava entirely, where the landscape changes at once: the fishermen's huts of Cala S'Alguer, the untouched sands of Castell beach, pine woods running down to the water, a coastline that has somehow stayed clear of development. Palamós holds together two sides that rarely coexist in one place — the authenticity of a working fishing harbor, and some of the best-preserved calas on the Mediterranean.

Baix Empordà

Pals

Some towns are built to be seen, and some are built to see. Pals belongs to the second kind. It went up on top of a hill, its back to nothing and its face toward everything: the rice plain, the sea somewhere out past it, the Medes islands floating on the horizon. Its tower once watched the whole coast. Nothing gets watched from there now, but the habit of looking has stayed in the stone, and anyone who climbs to the top ends up doing exactly what the sentries did — standing still, looking far off, in no hurry at all.

Baix Empordà

Peratallada

Some places are made of time, and some are made of stone. Peratallada is both at once, because here the stone is the time: it's written in the moat cut by hand into the rock, in walls that haven't changed in eight hundred years, in archways worn smooth by hands long gone. The name says it all before you've even stepped inside. Pedra tallada. Cut stone. A town named for what it is, and one that turns out to be exactly what its name promises.

Baix Empordà

Platja d’Aro

Platja d’Aro is this coast's practical face: the longest, easiest beach, the liveliest shopping streets, the widest range of things to do with children in tow. It's part of the municipality of Castell-Platja d’Aro, together with S’Agaró and Castell d’Aro itself, and that pairing sums the place up well: a modern beachfront and a village life that, a short way inland, still smells of medieval stone. It isn't the quietest corner of the Costa Brava, but it has its own — a run of calas heading south that get smaller and more secretive the further you walk.

Alt Empordà

Portbou

Some towns are visited for their beaches. Portbou is remembered for what it represents: the last town in Catalonia before France, a place where the Pyrenees drop straight into the Mediterranean and where history has left a mark as deep as the landscape itself. For more than a century it was one of the great railway gateways between Spain and the rest of Europe — freight passed through here, travelers, exiles, refugees, Walter Benjamin among them, who found in Portbou the end of his flight from Nazism. Today, far from the bustle of other Costa Brava towns, Portbou keeps a quiet, faintly melancholic character, where sea, mountain and border sit within a few meters of each other.

Baix Empordà

S’Agaró

S’Agaró isn't a fishing village that grew up over time, the way almost all its neighbors on this coast did. It's a place someone drew whole: in 1916, the industrialist Josep Ensesa commissioned the noucentista architect Rafael Masó to design a garden town on the cliffside — villas of clean Mediterranean lines, gardens tended down to the last hedge, and a coastal path conceived as a promenade, not a necessity. A century later, it's still exactly that: the most orderly, most photographed stretch of coast in the Baix Empordà, and the only one where the whole landscape answers to a single idea.

Baix Empordà

Sant Antoni de Calonge

Sant Antoni de Calonge is, really, half a story: the municipality is called Calonge i Sant Antoni, two places with their own character just four kilometers apart. Sant Antoni is the seafront — promenade and beach; Calonge, inland, holds the castle and the medieval quarter that give the whole the other half of its identity. Stay on the sand alone, and you've missed half the town.

Baix Empordà

Sant Feliu de Guíxols

Sant Feliu de Guíxols was, for centuries, this region's front door: the harbor everything moved through, crowned by a Benedictine monastery already a hundred years old when the last millennium began. That past hasn't gone anywhere — it's still there in the horseshoe arches of the Porta Ferrada, in the tiled domes along the passeig, in the very name of the music festival that fills the monastery square every summer — but Sant Feliu doesn't live off memory alone. It's a real, working town, with a market and year-round neighbors, and it happens to have the good fortune that the Costa Brava's most celebrated camí de ronda begins, literally, on its beach.

Baix Empordà

Tamariu

Tamariu takes its name from the tamariu, the tamarisk that grew on this cala long before the town existed. Today it's still the smallest and quietest of Palafrugell's three coastal towns — [Calella](/en/pueblos/calella-de-palafrugell), [Llafranc](/en/pueblos/llafranc) and Tamariu — and that's exactly where its charm lives. There's no grand promenade here, no harbor crowded with boats: the houses run straight to the sand, the boats rest on the beach, and the sea is simply part of everyday life. The beach isn't somewhere you go — it's the town's living room. Even though it fills up with life in summer, Tamariu holds on to something that's grown scarce on the Costa Brava: quiet. Walk a few minutes along the Camí de Ronda and the terraces fall away, leaving only cliffs, pine woods, and some of the clearest water on the Mediterranean.

La Selva

Tossa de Mar

Tossa de Mar is the only town on the whole Catalan coast that still has its medieval walled quarter fully intact. By day it can look like a monument: cobbled streets, camera shutters, visitors working their way along the towers. But wait for dusk and its real character shows: once the day-trippers leave, the Vila Vella settles back into silence, the walls go back to being simply stone, gulls replace the noise, and the Mediterranean changes color beneath the castle. That's when you understand why Marc Chagall called it his "blue paradise." But Tossa is far more than its walls: behind the postcard survives an old fishing quarter, hidden calas, natural pools among the rocks, and a seafaring tradition still served up at its tables.