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.
Pedra tallada: a name that's also a description
Peratallada means, in Catalan, cut stone — and the name isn't decoration, it's a record. The place-name Petra Tallada has been documented since the tenth century, and it comes from the moat that rings the town, carved straight into the sandstone bedrock it sits on. The same cut stone went on to build the houses. The town was built, quite literally, out of itself.
That moat is what makes Peratallada unique. It's one of the very few places in the region whose defensive structure — walls, moat and towers — has survived almost intact since the Middle Ages, not rebuilt but simply kept. You walk in through what was once a guarded gate, and all at once you're inside another century, no cars, no noise, stone underfoot and stone on the walls with the light falling in between. There's nothing to look for. Just walk slowly and let the town do the rest.
The castle and the plaça de les Voltes
The heart of Peratallada is its castle, one of the oldest in Catalonia: the keep, the palace and the walls all date between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, a feudal ensemble that has simply stayed still in time. Around it winds a maze of narrow lanes where it's easy — and worthwhile — to get lost.
The center of life is the plaça de les Voltes, the square of the arches: medieval stone porticoes that today shelter terraces, and from which the carrer Major runs off, the town's loveliest street, lined with craft shops and quiet corners. Everything here is small, and that's the charm of it. Peratallada isn't something you look at — it's something you walk through. And you walk through it twice, because the second time round you notice what the first time, too dazzled, you missed.
Sant Esteve and the quiet outside
Just outside the walls stands the church of Sant Esteve, Romanesque and Gothic, with its cemetery and a calm set apart from the bustle of the terraces. The walk out is worth it: from there you see the whole town for what it is, a single stone on the plain, and understand its scale properly.
Peratallada is one of the few places where the cliché actually holds true: time really does seem to stop. Partly because no cars come in, partly because the stone itself won't let anyone hurry. Come on a weekday, or early, or late in the afternoon, once the coach tours have left and the town belongs again to whoever stays. That's when what's supposed to happen, happens — which is nothing. Just the stone, the light, and you.
The medieval triangle of the Empordà
Peratallada belongs to the municipality of Forallac, formed in 1977 by merging three villages — Peratallada itself, Vulpellac and Fonteta — and it's part of a cluster of medieval inland towns in the Baix Empordà that together make up one of the Costa Brava's most understated treasures.
A few minutes away lie Pals, on its hill of rice fields; Ullastret, with the best-preserved Iberian settlement in Catalonia; Palau-sator and Sant Julià de Boada, almost secrets in themselves. You can string them together on a short day's drive, stopping to eat wherever you happen to land and to drink at the first shaded terrace you find. This is the inland Costa Brava: no sea in sight, but all the light of the Empordà, and none of the shoreline's hurry.
