Cabanes

The morning tramuntana arrives without warning, a cold northern wind that flattens the wheat and sends shutters clapping against stone. In Cabanes, 26 metres above sea level and barely ten kilometres from the Mediterranean, locals barely glance up. They’ve already carried the café con leche tables indoors and weighted the newspaper piles with an iron paperweight shaped like a pig. This is daily meteorology, not drama; the same wind that sculpts cypress trees into permanent bows also delivers the clear light that drew Salvador Dalí to the next-door comarca.

At first sight the village looks too ordinary for the guidebooks: one main road, one cash machine, one bakery that sells out of coques by ten. The church of Sant Esteve squats at the centre, its medieval bones patched with 18th-century stucco and a bell that still marks the agricultural day. Stand in the plaça at seven o’clock and you’ll watch the exodus: half the population heads off to Figueres, Roses or the AP-7, tail-lights disappearing into the cereal plain. What remains is the steady half-throttle of rural life: a tractor reversing, a woman pinning washing to a line that faces south to dodge the tramuntana, the smell of diesel and orange peel.

Cabanes makes no attempt to stage itself. The tourist office is a glass cupboard inside the ajuntament, open Tuesday and Thursday if the secretary isn’t at the dentist. Maps are photocopied, bilingual in Catalan and sun-faded Spanish, and they send you politely towards the surrounding grid of farm tracks rather than towards any “must-see” monument. This refusal to perform is, oddly, what makes the place useful. You drop your luggage, borrow a bike from the landlord (€12 a day, helmet optional) and slip straight into the Empordà’s working landscape.

Pedal south-east and within fifteen minutes the macadam gives way to packed earth between dry-stone walls. Almond orchards finish flowering in late February; by May the fields have turned to gold stubble that crackles under tyres. The GR-92 footpath skirts the village, but most walkers skip this flat section in their rush for the cliffs of Cap de Creus. That leaves the lanes empty except for the occasional farmer in a white van who raises two fingers from the steering wheel in automatic greeting. Signs nailed to olive trunks advertise olives arbequines for sale: €3 a kilo, bring your own bucket. Phone numbers have six digits; you’re still close enough to Girona for short dialling, far enough for mobile signal to vanish behind every carob grove.

Back in the village, lunch is dictated by the day of the week. Monday and Wednesday the bar at the petrol station does a three-course menú del dia for €14, wine included, but you eat beside lorry drivers watching motorcycle racing. Better to wait until Friday, when the equestrian club fires up an outdoor paella pan wide enough to bathe a toddler. Locals pay €10, visitors €12; the rice comes studded with rabbit and garrofó beans, the wine is poured from a plastic jug labelled “vi de pagès” and nobody checks whether you’re on the list. If you insist on tablecloths, drive ten minutes to Vila-sacra, where Restaurant Cal Tet serves suquet de peix that tastes of proper sea bottom rather than catering stock. Three courses with a glass of Empordà white runs about €32; book at weekends because half of Figueres has the same idea.

The coast is equally close yet psychologically distant. Roses, with its long sandy sweep and inflatable banana rides, is 19 km south; the coves of L’Escala add another five. In July the road backs up from the roundabout by the Carrefour, and day-trippers queue forty minutes for a parking meter. Cabanes itself remains mostly empty even in August, when the village fiesta fills the streets with fireworks and portable discos. The fiesta mayor falls around the 15th; neighbours sponsor penyes that compete in communal dinners and late-night bingo. Visitors are welcome but not courted. If you want a hotel room you’ll have to stay in Figueres; Cabanes offers two rural casas that sleep six each, €90 a night minimum, plus a cottage attached to a chicken farm where the cockerel starts at five whether you’re on holiday or not.

Spring and autumn make more sense. In April the plain stripes green and yellow between wheat and mustard weed; migrant honey buzzards ride the tramuntana thermals overhead. October brings the olive harvest: nets spread under century-old trees, the air sharp with sap and diesel. Both seasons deliver 22 °C at midday, 12 °C after dark, and accommodation prices drop by a third. The only hazard is the wind itself: when it tops 70 km/h the police close the N-260 to high-sided lorries, and cyclists find themselves pedalling on the spot.

Getting here without a car requires determination. A regional train links Barcelona to Figuerers in 55 minutes; from there a taxi costs €25, a bus runs twice daily except Sunday, and the driver sometimes forgets to stop if no one rings the bell. Car hire is sensible: Girona airport is 45 minutes away, Perpignan just over an hour. Roads are empty enough to make driving relaxing, until you meet a combine harvester occupying both lanes. Fill the tank before arrival; the village pumps close at eight and the nearest 24-hour station is 12 km towards the autopista.

Even with wheels you need to reset your clock. Shops shut between two and four, Saturday afternoons, all day Sunday. The bakery will sell you yesterday’s croissants at half price, but only if you ask in Catalan; Spanish works, English produces a polite shrug. Credit cards are refused under €10, so keep coins for coffee. Wi-Fi exists, yet the connection drops every time the wind knocks the antenna. None of this feels contrived; it’s simply how life functioned before smartphones, preserved because the village never pivoted to tourism.

Stay a week and the place starts to calibrate your sense of distance. Ten kilometres becomes a casual bike ride to the coast; thirty is a morning loop taking in medieval Perelada and its castle winery. Back in the plaça you recognise the same faces: the man who sold you almonds, the woman who served Friday paella, the teenager who checked your oil level at the garage. They nod, not out of commercial friendliness but because you are temporarily part of the pattern. Leave and the tramuntana keeps blowing, wheat bends, shutters clap. Cabanes continues, unconcerned whether you return, quietly useful precisely because it never asked to be visited.