Biure

Overview

Biure is a village and municipality in the Alt Empordà, inland in the province of Girona, at the point where the Ricardell runs into the Llobregat d’Empordà. It covers 10 km² at 81 m above sea level and borders Darnius and Capmany to the north, Masarac and Peralada to the east, Cabanes and Pont de Molins to the south, and Boadella d’Empordà to the west. The population was 227 in 2025, so this is a place with more listed buildings than streets. The traditional spelling of the name is Viure d’Empordà.

Seven things in Biure carry protection under Catalonia’s architectural heritage inventory: the old core itself, the church of Sant Esteve, the castle ruin on the hill outside, two bridges, and two houses from the start of the 20th century. None of them charges admission and none of them is staffed. There is no visitor centre, no ticket desk and no tourist office.

The Ricardell itself is worth calibrating your expectations about. It is a rain-fed river, fed only by the autumn and spring rains, and it reaches its minimum in August; the banks carry alders and poplars. Come in high summer and the thing the village is named around will be a bed of dry stones.

History

The earliest document naming the place is a testament of 1107, in which a woman called Etha lists the church of Sancti Stephani de Benevivere among her beneficiaries. In 1219 a document in the diocesan archive of Girona puts Biure on a list of tithes belonging to the Empordà magnate Guillem de Cervià.

In 1294 King Jaume II confirmed and extended the privileges of the charter of Figueres, and the document names Biure as a royal place, subject to no feudal lord and answering directly to the bailiwick of Figueres. That status is the reason for the argument everyone here still knows about.

Control of the parish and the castle was contested for most of the next century. Guillem d’Avinyó clashed repeatedly with the Rocabertí family over both in 1407, and a document of June 1450 finally confirms the Avinyó as lords of Biure; by 1463 the lord was Bernat d’Avinyó. By the 18th century the rights over the castle had passed to the Count of Torralba, which is why the inventory still files the ruin under his title.

The population figures explain the village you actually walk through. The 1787 census counted 185 people; by 1857 there were 687, and almost every house in the old core dates from that long 18th and 19th century expansion.

One building records the village’s other history, the associative one. Mutual aid societies spread through the Alt Empordà in the 19th century to pay for medical care for members who could not afford it, funded by subscription. Biure’s began to form in 1887 as La Fraternal, and its permanent home on the plaça del Carme was built in 1911. The society wound itself up in 1994, once the state social security system had taken over its job, and the building was restored between 1995 and 1999 by the architect Xavier Teixidor Bigas, a job selected for the 1999 Girona regional architecture awards. It now works as the village civic centre and everyone calls it La Sala.

Visiting

Nothing in Biure is ticketed, gated or timed, so the visit is simply a walk. The protected core lies on the southern side of the built-up area, with the best of it immediately south of the church, and the streets run short and steep because the ground rises there.

Look up at the eaves. Most of the houses are 18th and 19th century, built of unworked stone of mixed sizes laid irregularly in generous lime mortar, with rectangular openings framed in plain stone or brick and the occasional segmental-arch doorway. Many are finished with eaves decorated in painted triangles, an imitation of sawtooth brick courses, and one house northwest of the church carries eaves dated 1776.

The church of Sant Esteve stands at Plaça de la Constitució 1, between the square and the carrer Processó. The dates are all outside, on the stone: the flat lintel over the rectangular main door is engraved with an inscription and the year 1702, and the sacristy window on the east wall carries 1703. Above the door sits a niche holding the image of the patron, framed by stone pilasters topped with spheres; higher again is a voussoired rose window, and a repainted sundial occupies the west end of the façade. The bell tower rises square at the base and octagonal above. Inside, if you catch it open, one of the holy water stoups is dated 1627. The council publishes no opening hours for it.

The castle is 300 m northwest of the village on a steep-sided hill, and what survives is two stretches of battered wall meeting at a right angle: the southern one about five metres long and three high, the eastern one shorter and about the same height, both roughly a metre thick, built of undressed limestone in lime mortar. It is small, and it is a national heritage monument.

Two bridges are worth the detour. The medieval one is inside the village on its eastern edge, a single segmental arch over the Ricardell, reinforced underneath with brick laid on edge and now surfaced in asphalt. The Pont a Campmany, northeast on the old road and long out of use, is the better piece of masonry: two round arches of unequal size with a triangular cutwater between them, capped by a pyramid, the whole thing in squared ashlar laid in regular courses.

Back in the streets, two early 20th-century houses reward a second look. Casa la Fraternitat sits on the corner of the carrer de Maçanet and the plaça del Carme, a single tall hall ringed by a first-floor gallery under a timber truss roof, with a glass wing added on the southwest side during the restoration. The house at carrer Processó 6, on the corner with the carrer de la Barberia, has a sgraffito panel between its second-floor windows bearing the initials M.B and the year 1915.

Beyond the houses there is a monument to Pierre Bayle, a French drummer killed at the battle of Montroig at the age of eleven; the spring known as la Fonteta, which feeds the Ricardell and still has its old communal washhouse; dry-stone huts in the fields; and Can Sans, a former oil mill that now serves as the town hall.

Tips

• The town hall is at Carrer Nou 3, postcode 17723, and it opens to the public on Mondays and Wednesdays only, 18:00 to 20:00. Phone 972 529 291, email ajuntament@biure.cat. Outside those four hours a week there is nobody in Biure to ask.

• Go in autumn or spring if you want to see the Ricardell as a river. It runs on rainfall alone and bottoms out in August.

• Wear shoes you can climb in. The castle sits 300 m out of the village on a hill with sharply pitched slopes, and the surviving walls stand about three metres high with nothing built around them.

• Biure belongs to the Consorci Salines Bassegoda, set up in September 2007 by seventeen municipalities and the Diputació de Girona to look after the landscape and heritage of this inland corner of Catalonia. Fellow members with their own guides here include Albanyà and Avinyonet de Puigventós.

• The waymarked mountain-bike network signed G-05 Salines-Bassegoda passes through the village, and the council flags three routes as the closest: BTT 17 from Pont de Molins to Biure, BTT 18 along the Ricardell, and BTT 19, La mà de l’home. The consortium office is at Plaça de la Vila 5 in Navata, on 972 56 50 04.

• Biure has bunkers, and they are not on a schedule. The council has run a guided visit to them led by Santi Coll as part of the Jornades de l’Empordà, but it is an occasional event announced on the site, not a standing service. Check the agenda page before you build a day around it.

• Come by car. The council’s public transport page for Biure amounts to a link to Renfe and one local coach operator, which tells you what the bus service is like. There is no station in the village.

• Bring your own food and water. There is no ticket desk, no visitor centre and no tourist office here, and the village does not advertise any shop or café on its own website.