Albanyà

Overview

Albanyà is a village of 157 people in the Pyrenean foothills of the Alt Empordà, and the municipality around it was certified in June 2017 as the first International Dark Sky Park in Spain. It sits at 239 metres on the upper Muga, 25 km of climbing road from Figueres, and what brings people up here is the sky rather than the village.

The arithmetic explains the darkness. The municipality covers 94.4 km² and holds those 157 residents, about 1.66 people per square kilometre, and most of that ground is oak, holm oak and pine forest.

The built village takes about five minutes to walk end to end. There is the Romanesque parish church of Sant Pere, a surviving gate of the old town wall on a street parallel to the river, and the town hall on Carrer Figueres, open Wednesday and Friday mornings.

Everything worth the drive is outside the houses. Albanyà lies inside the protected Alta Garrotxa, 329 km² of Prepyrenean ridge and gorge split between three comarques of Catalonia and given PEIN status in 1992. The GR-11, the long Pyrenean traverse, comes down off the Garrotxa side and passes straight through the village.

History

People were in these valleys long before the place had a name. The cave known as the cova de la Pólvora and the megalithic cist at the Creu de Principi are the surviving traces.

The monastery came next and gave the village its centre. Abbot Donnul founded a Benedictine house here in the first quarter of the 9th century, between 820 and 825, with the permission of Count Rampó. The settlement first appears in writing as Albanianum in 844, in a diploma of the Frankish king Charles the Bald in Donnul’s favour, and from 869 the house answered to Santa Maria d’Arles over the mountains in the Vallespir.

The village was walled at some point, and one gate survived. The Portal d’Albanyà, on the southeast side by a street parallel to the river, is a Romanesque construction of the 10th to 11th centuries: two round arches of voussoirs with the slot for a portcullis between them, and a stub of wall to the left with a blocked arrow slit.

Charcoal paid the bills for centuries. Cereals, potatoes, pulses and fodder grew in the fields, vegetables along the Muga, and cattle grazed the high pasture, but the money came from charcoal burned in the woods and sold to the cities. Butane arrived in the middle of the 20th century and ended it, and the farms and hamlets emptied.

The collapse was steep. The municipality counted 1,059 people in 1857, 187 by 1970 and 108 by 1990, before a slow recovery that has still not reached a fifth of the peak. In 1969 Albanyà took in the neighbouring municipality of Bassegoda, whose capital was Lliurona, which moved the whole territory out of the Garrotxa and into the Alt Empordà.

What refilled some of the houses was other people’s idea of the same emptiness: second homes, neo-rural settlers, and visitors who come for the forest, the hunting and the autumn mushrooms. The sky became an asset in 2015, when the Bassegoda Park campsite was accredited by the Starlight Foundation as the first Starlight camp on the Iberian Peninsula.

Visiting

Nothing in Albanyà is ticketed or gated. The village, the churches and the tracks are open at any hour, and the only thing you have to book is a session at the observatory.

Stargazing at the observatory

Sessions are run by the resident astronomers Pere Guerra and Pau Bosch, as an audiovisual tour of the sky adjusted to the weather and the season, with music by Pep Sala. Catalan and Spanish are the scheduled languages. English and French sessions run only by reservation and only for groups of 20 people or more, which is the single most important thing to know before you plan a night here.

The hardware is better than the setting suggests. The main instrument is a 16-inch (406 mm) Meade ACF catadioptric at f/8 on a 10Micron GM3000 HPS equatorial mount, under a fully automated four-metre dome, which the observatory calls the largest telescope in the province of Girona.

Talks and the school programmes happen in the Sala de les Constel·lacions, a 100-seat room inside the campsite next to the games room, walled with a panorama of astronomers and a mural of satellites at their real distances from Earth.

Walking the GR-11

Albanyà is the overnight point between two hard stages of the Pyrenean traverse. Stage 39a arrives from the hermitage of Sant Aniol d’Aguja, 17.07 km with 1,076 metres of ascent and 1,282 of descent, about five hours. Stage 40a leaves for La Vajol, 26.02 km with 1,381 metres of ascent over roughly 6 hours 40 minutes, and is graded for experienced walkers.

The summit above it all is the Puig de Bassegoda, 1,373.7 metres, shared with Montagut i Oix and easy to pick out because it stands alone and comes to a point. The top is bare rock, with sight lines running from the Gulf of Roses to Canigó, and a plaque placed by the Centre Excursionista d’Olot in 1971 marks it as the setting Marià Vayreda chose to open his novel La punyalada.

The river and the Romanesque

The Muga rises inside the municipality, at the Pla de la Muga on the boundary with Serrallonga, and runs past the village on its way to Sant Llorenç de la Muga and eventually the sea at Empuriabrava. Its swimming pools, the Gorgues de la Muga, are five to ten minutes from the campsite, which also has a restaurant and an outdoor pool open from 30 May to 27 September.

Beyond Sant Pere and the gate, the Romanesque here is a driving and walking circuit rather than a visit. Sant Miquel de Bassegoda, a restored 12th-century church with a single nave and a bellcote, Sant Andreu de Llorona and Sant Bartomeu de Pincaró are all 12th century, Sant Cristòfol dels Horts is documented in 990, and the monastery of Sant Llorenç del Mont at Sous is 11th century. Expect single-track roads, locked doors and, in the case of Sant Corneli de la Muga, a ruined nave with the apse still standing.

Tips

• Sort the language before the date. Scheduled sessions are in Catalan and Spanish; English and French only happen for booked groups of at least 20.

• Rain cancels. The observatory reschedules sessions when it rains, and on merely cloudy nights it substitutes archived images while keeping the talk, so a marginal forecast still gets you an evening but not the sky.

• The drive is the commitment. Figueres to Albanyà is 25 km on the GI-510 and GI-511 through Terrades and Sant Llorenç de la Muga; Girona is 70 km away, Roses 40 and Barcelona 163. There is no railway and no useful public transport at the end of it.

• Come with a full tank and a full boot. The village runs to a handful of hospitality businesses and no more, and the nearest real shopping is back down the valley.

• Both public buildings keep short hours. The town hall on Carrer Figueres 13 opens Wednesday and Friday, 10:00 to 14:00, and the municipal library at the same address opens Tuesday and Thursday, 17:00 to 19:00, with a stock rotated monthly from the library in Figueres.

• Swim in the river outside high summer. The campsite pool covers 30 May to 27 September, and the Gorgues de la Muga are the fallback either side of that.

• Autumn belongs to mushroom pickers and hunters. Both are long-standing local activities across these forests, and a designated hunting area covers the Bassegoda and Muga ground, so wear something bright if you leave the marked paths in season.

• Do the GR-11 stages as an overnight, not a day trip. Arriving from Sant Aniol d’Aguja and leaving for La Vajol are five and nearly seven hours of walking respectively, and the campsite one kilometre out of the village is where the beds are.