Besalú

Overview

Besalú is a walled medieval town of about 2,500 people in the Garrotxa, in northern Catalonia, entered across a seven-arch Romanesque bridge over the Fluvià. It was the seat of an independent county until 1111, and enough of that town survived the following 900 years for the whole core to be declared a conjunt històric-artístic in 1966. The registered population was 2,518 in 2024.

The way a visit works here is worth knowing before you arrive. Streets, squares, arcades, the bridge and the riverbank walk are open at any hour and cost nothing. The interiors are a different matter: the miqvé and the synagogue excavations in the old Jewish quarter are opened for the guided visits run by the municipal tourist office at the foot of the bridge, not left unlocked for people who wander in. Two hours does the outside. Half a day does the outside plus one guided visit and a long lunch.

Distances are short enough that most people come for a few hours and sleep elsewhere. Girona is 32.9 km away, Figueres 24.7 km, Olot 21.1 km and Banyoles 13.6 km. That closeness is also the problem: coaches from the coast and from Barcelona arrive mid-morning and the arcades fill up, then empty again after four. Catalan is the working language of the town and Spanish is understood everywhere.

Besalú is not a museum village kept for show. Textiles, metalworking and gypsum quarrying were the mainstays before tourism took over, and the industrial buildings are still standing at the edges of the old core.

History

The town began as a castle on the small hill where the ruins of Santa Maria stand now, documented in the 10th century and placed there to watch three roads: the road to Olot and the Pyrenees, the road to Figueres and the sea, and the road to Girona. Besalú became a county of its own in 894, with its own dynasty, and Wilfred the Hairy held the title. The Latin name Bisuldunum means a fort on a mountain between two rivers, which is a flat description of the site: the Fluvià on one side, the Capellades stream on the other.

The 11th century is when the town got the buildings it still trades on. Count-Bishop Miró founded the Benedictine monastery of Sant Pere in 977, and Bernat I, known as Tallaferro, had the church consecrated in 1003. Tallaferro also pushed through a short-lived bishopric of Besalú, which existed from 1017 to 1020 and vanished when he died. Independence ended in 1111, when Bernat III died without children and the county passed to the house of Barcelona.

A Jewish community lived here from the 9th century until 1436, around twenty families at its medieval height, with a synagogue documented in 1264. The ritual bath below the synagogue courtyard was lost for centuries. It was found by accident in 1964, from above, and the town describes it as the first building of its kind identified in Spain and the third in Europe. It is the only Romanesque miqvé still standing in the country.

The bridge has been rebuilt repeatedly since. By 1881 neither the defensive tower nor the entrance gate was standing any more, probably knocked through to let textile machinery pass, and what remained was blown up during the Civil War. The version you cross was put back in the 1950s and 1960s by the architect Pons Sorolla for the Dirección General de Arquitectura. The Civil War took the other landmark too: the great bell tower on the north side of Santa Maria fell in 1938, and its stone went into repairing the church of Sant Vicenç and the bridge itself. Very little of what you photograph is untouched, and the town does not pretend otherwise.

Visiting

Start on the Pont Vell, because there is no sensible alternative: the car parks sit outside the old town and the bridge is the front door. It has seven arches, runs 105 m long and stands about 30 m high counting the tower, and it bends in the middle because the piers were founded on the rocks in the riverbed rather than on a straight line. Cross it early or late. Between 11:00 and 16:00 you will be photographing other people photographing it.

The tourist office is at Carrer del Pont 1, at the town end of the bridge, and it is the desk that unlocks everything else. Two guided visits run in several languages. “Descobreix el Besalú medieval” covers the whole historic centre, takes 75 minutes and costs 5 EUR per person; “Un passeig pel call” is a 30-minute walk through the Jewish quarter at 2.50 EUR per person. At weekends there is a departure at 12:00, and you book on +34 972 59 12 40 or by email rather than online.

The Jewish quarter

The call runs down the slope towards the river, and the miqvé sits at the bottom of it, on the site of the old Jewish square where the synagogue stood. It is a single underground room of cut stone with a barrel vault, an arrow-slit window facing east, and a pool that filled naturally from a spring that no longer exists. Part of the synagogue’s prayer hall and its courtyard have been excavated alongside it. There is no display, no lighting rig and no gift shop, which is the point.

Prat de Sant Pere and the monastery

The monastery church is the biggest thing in town after the bridge. Look for the ambulatory, a corridor built for pilgrims to circulate past the relics of Sant Prim and Sant Felicià, and for the eight columns dividing it from the high altar, whose capitals carry biblical scenes, plants and mythological animals. On the facade, a single window is framed by two lions standing over an ape and a man, a piece of 12th-century argument about the Church holding off evil.

Casa Cornellà, on the same open square, dates from the end of the 12th century and is one of the better preserved pieces of civil Romanesque architecture in Catalonia: stables and service rooms on the ground floor, a gallery of round arches on the first where the Cornellà family actually lived, and a courtyard that lights every room. It is privately owned by the Solà-Morales family and opens only for special visits.

The parish church of Sant Vicenç, documented from 977, is Romanesque with Gothic elements creeping into the rose window and the main window. Inside are the Gothic tomb of Pere de Rovira, who brought the relics of Saint Vincent to Besalú in 1413, and a side chapel holding a fragment of the True Cross given by Francesc Cambó in 1923, a replacement for the one Tallaferro carried back from Rome in 1017 and which was stolen in 1899. Finish uphill at Santa Maria, where recent digging has exposed the apses of the old comital chapel inside the later east end, and the view back down over the bridge is the one everyone else is queueing for from below.

Tips

• Book the guided visit before you drive over. The tourist office takes reservations on +34 972 59 12 40 or by email at turisme@ajbesalu.cat, and there is no online booking system to fall back on.
• The office is published as open daily 10:00 to 14:00 and 16:00 to 19:00. Arrive at 14:30 and you have two hours of locked doors ahead of you, so plan the outdoor half of the visit for the middle of the afternoon.
• Coming by road, leave the AP-7 at exit 6 (Argelaguer) and take the C-66. Teisa runs buses from Girona, Olot and Banyoles, and the nearest railway station is Girona.
• Reckon on 35 minutes from Girona and an hour and a half from Barcelona. Barcelona sits 133 km away, so this works as a day trip but a slow one.
• Traffic inside the historic core is deliberately restricted and parking is regulated, so do not plan on driving to your hotel door.
• Wear shoes with grip. The centre is cobbled and sloping, and some spaces cannot be reached in a wheelchair.
• The Besalú Medieval fair takes over the town on the last weekend of August, as it has since 1987; the 2026 edition runs 28 to 30 August and most acts are free. Decide whether you want jousting under the bridge and fire shows, or an empty town. You cannot have both that weekend.
• During the fair, park at the marked areas on the way into the village, at Plaça del Sol and the sports zone, and get there before 17:00. Accommodation in Besalú and the surrounding villages sells out for it.
• If the Jewish quarter is your reason for coming, aim for the first weekend of March, when Besalú, Ciutat Jueva puts on dedicated guided visits to the call along with talks and a craft market.

• December belongs to the Fira de la Ratafia, the town’s herbal liqueur fair, which pulls in around 3,000 people in a day for tastings, traditional music and sardanes. A weekend in October brings Liberisliber, a book fair drawing about 1,800.
• Cash machines exist in the centre but are scattered, so draw money before you need it rather than hunting for one on a Sunday.