Avinyonet de Puigventós

Overview

Avinyonet de Puigventós is a farming village of about 1,670 people in the middle of the Alt Empordà, northern Catalonia, 6.3 km west of Figueres on the road to Besalú and Olot. The reason to turn off is the parish church of Sant Esteve, built in the 15th century as a genuine fortress with a defensive ditch, merlons and machicolations, and standing inside the walls of what was a Knights Hospitaller castle.

The municipality covers 12.31 km² at around 70 m above sea level, sits where the river Manol takes in the Rissec, and borders Llers to the north, Vilafant to the east, Vilanant to the west, and Borrassà and Ordis to the south. The Figueres to Besalú road cuts the place in two: the medieval core on one side, the Mas Pau housing estate on the other, with the small outlying settlement of Santa Eugènia and a spread of farmsteads beyond. Ground rises to the north into a stony upland called the Garriga d’Empordà, topping out on Puig Ventós at 163.4 m.

This is a commuter village now, not a shrinking one. The register counted 369 people in 1970 and 1,673 in 2020, most of that growth arriving after 2000.

Beyond the monuments there are two pieces of countryside people actually come for. The Garriga d’Empordà is around 1,245 hectares of low, dry, rocky ground shared with Llers, Vilanant, Biure and Pont de Molins, covered in kermes oak scrub and threaded with dry-stone terraces, walls, channels and field huts; more than 600 dry-stone structures in the area are logged on the Wikipedra inventory. The other is the Estanyols de Mas Margall, roughly 20 hectares of old gravel workings on the Manol turned back into wetland, with two small pools, a willow grove and wet grassland, now on the regional wetlands inventory and managed by the naturalist body IAEDEN under an agreement with the owner. There is a car park, a small picnic area and two purpose-built hides for watching birds without disturbing them.

History

People were working this ground long before the village existed. Neolithic tool finds have turned up in the municipality, and the clearest early evidence is the Roman villa at Font del Vilar, in use from the 2nd century BC to the 5th century AD.

The first written reference is from 962, and not under the present name: the place appears as Sant Esteve de Manibulo, or Sant Esteve de Manol, in a document recording the count of Besalú swapping allods he held at Manol and Figueres. The name Avinyó follows in 1090 and 1107, attached to a person: Berenguer d’Avinyó, who witnessed documents for the counts of Besalú. The village was still called Avinyó into the 13th century; the diminutive Avinyonet only settled in from the 14th, probably to distinguish it from the Occitan city of the same name that had become a papal seat.

Everything here grew from the castle. It is documented as a fortification of the county of Besalú from the 11th century, held by the lords of Avignuno, and the village formed and spread eastwards beside it. In 1128 it was attacked by Count Ponç II of Empúries, who was taken prisoner by Ramon Berenguer III shortly afterwards. A papal bull of Alexander III in 1176 records the church of Sant Esteve d’Avinyó as belonging to the monastery of Vilabertran.

In 1234 Ferrer Portell and his wife Escalona handed the castle to the Order of Mercè, and by 1257 it had passed to the Order of the Hospital, which made it the head of a commandery. The first Hospitaller commander was Gombau de Vallfort. The order held the place for over five centuries, until the last commander, Jaume de Camprodon, in 1804.

The church you see today exists because the river destroyed its predecessor. The old parish church was wrecked by a flood of the Manol, and at the start of the 15th century the men of the village built a replacement with Hospitaller backing, fortified in the way a military order would want it. The commandery building itself was partly pulled down in the early 1400s to make room for it, and works on the church in 1516 finished off what remained of the castle’s quadrangular walled plan. The order’s chapel of Sant Joan survived longer: it became the Casa de la Vila in 1907 and still keeps the chapel’s rectangular shell and rough corner stones.

Two later dates matter. The writer and playwright Josep Pous i Pagès, born in Figueres in 1873, married in 1893 and moved to Avinyonet to run the family property, and it was here that he started writing; his novel La vida i la mort d’en Jordi Fraginals is counted among the major Catalan novels of the 20th century. And on 27 June 1916 a royal decree added Puigventós to the name, which until then had been plain Avinyonet, to tell it apart from Avinyonet del Penedès.

Visiting

Nothing here is ticketed, staffed or gated. The town hall has laid out a circular walking route, the Ruta cultural d’Avinyonet, that strings together everything worth seeing across the three settlements: 7 km, 35 m of total climb, graded easy. It starts at the plaça de la Societat, heads out towards Vilanant past the Estanyols de Mas Margall, crosses the Manol by a bridge and the main road on the far side, and drops into the Mas Pau estate.

Sant Esteve is a single rectangular nave with battered and crenellated walls, built into the neighbouring castle rather than beside it. Look above the 18th-century door: the tympanum from the original Romanesque doorway was reset there, carrying an image of Christ that is now badly worn. The 15th-century fabric was reworked again in the 1700s, so the building reads as a stack of periods rather than one design.

The castle takes more hunting. Its best-preserved piece is a rectangular fortified building on the south side of the church, known locally as cal cagó, about 7 m long by 5 m wide, with its east and west walls standing around 7 m high; it was lived in until recently and has modern doors and windows cut into the north face. Between it and the south wall is a 140 cm portal under a round arch of nine voussoirs, probably the fortress’s main entrance once, now opening onto a garden. Look for the stump of a square tower on carrer dels Fossos, a street named after the ditch of the old enclosure, and stretches of curtain wall with a battered base and merlons along the same street.

The rest of the villa sits in the plain inside the Mas Pau estate: buildings round a central courtyard, split between the residential pars urbana and a working pars rustica with sheds and stores of dolia, the big terracotta jars used for oil, wine or grain, plus two tanks probably tied to winemaking. Digs in 1983, from 1991 to 1993, and again in 2009 pulled out imported and local pottery, glass plates and cups, bronze ornaments, iron farm and household tools, and six coins.

A kilometre south of the village, the ermita de Santa Eugènia is a small single-nave church with a semicircular apse, Romanesque in origin and probably 11th century, altered in the 17th and restored by the Patronat Santa Eugènia in the 1970s. It was the parish church of the outlying farms and stands at an old crossroads. El Castellot, the other outlying ruin, is the north side of a slightly oval tower of large mortared stones on a hillock above the Manol and Rissec confluence; it is read as a watchtower of the castle, though Roman roof tiles and amphora fragments found nearby leave the possibility that something older stood there.

The second marked walk is the dry-stone route along the rec de les Costes: 6 km, about 2h30, easy, running between 58 m and 137 m with 76 m of accumulated climb. It begins at the Itinerànnia junction AE197, where carrer de Vilanant meets the camí vell behind mas Camins, and is waymarked in yellow paint. The huts are identified by their Wikipedra codes rather than names, and a few carry ubi.cat QR codes with more detail.

Tips

• Teisa runs the Figueres to Avinyonet bus; timetables are on teisa-bus.com. There is no station in the village, so trains get you as far as Figueres and no further.

• Driving from Figueres, take the N-260 towards Besalú and Olot, then leave the first roundabout on the GIP-5101 for the old core; carry straight on at the roundabout and turn left for the Mas Pau estate instead. Distances from the village: Figueres 6.3 km, Girona 43.1 km, Barcelona 142.7 km.

• The Festa Major de Sant Jaume runs for six days, Tuesday to Sunday, in the week of 25 July, with open-air cinema, a wine tasting, a poetry evening, theatre, dances, concerts and sardanes at various points around the village.

• Easter is the other date. The smaller Festa de Pasqua covers Easter Sunday and Easter Monday, and the aplec at the ermita de Santa Eugènia is held on Easter Monday itself. For families, the Fira infantil El Follet takes over the old core on the first weekend of October with workshops, storytelling and craft stalls.

• Skip the Garrigueta huts unless you are stubborn. There are a lot of them, but the paths in are choked with kermes oak scrub and hard to force. The huts along the rec de les Costes itself are easier to reach and just as good.

• For eating, the town hall lists La Societat Recreativa Avinyonetenca on plaça Pous i Pagès, Restaurant El Pont on the Figueres to Besalú road, and Mas Falgarona on the Llers road. That is the whole list, so ring ahead rather than turning up hungry.

• Registered places to stay are Mas Falgarona on the Llers road, Mas Camins at carrer Vilafant 1, Hotel Mas Bosch 1526 out at Les Tres Cases, and Can Barraca on carrer Simó Llauneta.

• Bring what you need for the day. The village pharmacy is Farmàcia Bertran at carrer Simó Llauneta 31; the nearest health centre is the CAP at Vilafant and the nearest hospital the Hospital Comarcal in Figueres.

• The town hall at carrer Ajuntament 4 opens Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 09:00 to 14:00 and is closed on Tuesdays. It is the place to ask if you want the church opened, and the postcode for anything you are booking is 17742.