Llers

The bakery in Llers opens at seven, but the bread doesn’t appear until twenty past. By then a queue of five has formed: two farmers in green work coats, a mother still wearing her cycling helmet, an elderly woman with a tiny dog wedged under her arm, and—if it’s July—a barefoot British teenager sent to fetch breakfast before the pool towels are claimed. The exchange is entirely in Catalan, the coins are counted out in euros, and the croissants are still warm. Nobody checks their phone; there is no signal worth bothering about.

This is the first lesson of Llers, a scatter of stone houses and smallholdings ten kilometres inland from Figueres: things happen when they happen. The village sits at 140 metres above the plain, high enough to catch the tramontana wind but low enough for the afternoon sun to feel serious from April onwards. Geographers call it the pre-Pyrenean fringe; locals simply say “l’interior”, the interior, as though the coast were another country. It is—only twenty minutes away by car, yet the traffic noise, the beach bars and the bilingual menus dissolve somewhere between the last roundabout and the olive groves.

A map of stone and soil

There is no centre in the tourist-board sense, just a tightening of lanes around the parish church of Sant Esteve. The building is medieval at its core, patched in the seventeenth century, whitewashed whenever the council had spare cash. Stand on the step and you can pivot through the village’s entire history: south-west, the cemetery wall built with Roman off-cuts; north, a 1920s schoolhouse now the doctor’s surgery; east, three new houses in concrete brick that nobody is proud of. Five minutes’ walk in any direction the asphalt gives way to farm tracks that smell of fennel and tractor diesel.

The tracks link a necklace of masías—fortified farmhouses with arched doorways and slots for rifles. Most still grow something: olives, soft wheat, the odd hectare of Grenache that ends up in Celler Empordà’s £8 bottles. One has been converted into a micro-hotel where Yorkshire couples book four nights because “it’s cheaper than a fortnight in Roses and the kids can cycle without being run over”. The pool is unfenced, so toddlers learn quickly that stone is unforgiving. Breakfast is served on the terrace at nine sharp; if you miss it, the baker still has croissants until noon.

Eating (and drinking) like someone who lives here

There is nowhere grand to eat, and that is half the point. Can Xiquet, the only restaurant, occupies a former coach house on the main GI-510. Inside, the tables are dressed with paper cloths and the menu hasn’t changed since the current owner’s grandmother ran the kitchen. A three-course menú del día costs €14 (£12) and begins with a bowl of lent stew thick enough to support a spoon upright. The wine arrives in a glass that could double as a goldfish bowl; it is local, young and tastes better after the second refill. Grilled chicken follows, then crema catalana scorched with a welding torch. Vegetarians get omelette; vegans get sympathy. Service stops at 21:00 sharp—kitchen staff need to be up for the bread run at four.

Between meals the social life of the village happens in the single bar, Bar Llers, where the coffee machine was manufactured in 1987 and still hisses like an angry cat. Cards are played for centimos, the television shows cycling on mute, and the wifi password is written on the wall in permanent marker. Order a vermut and you will be asked “suau o fort?”—sweet or dry. There is no wrong answer; both cost €2. If you need cash, the owner will direct you to the ATM in the pharmacy, but it charges €1.50 so people still write IOUs on paper napkins.

Walking off the wine

The council has printed a leaflet entitled “5 Rutes per Llers” which sounds ambitious until you discover that two of them are under three kilometres and the longest is eight. Even so, take a paper copy: waymarking consists of occasional yellow dots that fade faster than British resolve in August heat. The most satisfying loop heads north-west to the ruined chapel of Sant Miquel de Solterra. The gradient is gentle, the path alternates between red earth and fist-sized limestone, and the summit gives a straight-line view to the Pyrenees if the tramontana has scrubbed the sky clean. Allow two hours, plus another twenty minutes to photograph every poppy in May.

Mountain-bikers can stitch together farm lanes towards Vilanant or Capmany, but the surface ranges from packed gravel to “recently ploughed”. A litre of water is sensible; half a litre is optimistic. In summer the temperature nudges 35°C by eleven o’clock, so the prudent start early or give up and go to the beach instead—Cala Montgó is 28 minutes by car, parking €2 an hour, ice-cream €3 a scoop. The sea is colder than you hope, but after a morning on a tractor saddle it feels like mercy.

When the village throws a party

August brings the Festa Major, four days when the population quadruples and the bakery runs out of croissants by 07:15. A marquee goes up in the football field, the brass band arrives from Avinyonet, and teenagers who have spent the year at university in Barcelona remember the words to the Catalan folk songs. Giants dance at midnight, children chase fire-runners through the square, and someone’s uncle serves rabbit stew from a caldron big enough to bath a Labrador. Accommodation within the village is booked nine months ahead; if you arrive without a reservation you will be sleeping in Figueres and driving home sober.

January’s Sant Antoni is smaller but stranger: bonfires in the street, a priest sprinkling holy water on horses, and the smell of burnt pine needles drifting into the classrooms. British visitors often stumble upon it by accident, expecting a quiet off-season break and finding their hire car blocked by a procession of tractors. The advice is simple: park on the edge of the village, accept the offered glass of muscat, and don’t wear anything that melts.

Getting here, getting out

Girona airport is 50 minutes south on the AP-7 if the toll booth queue behaves; budget airlines land at 23:05 and the car-hire desks stay open as long as someone’s flight is delayed. From the airport Llers is a straight dash up the N-II, then a left turn after the Repsol station that looks closed but isn’t. There is no train, and the twice-daily bus from Figueres does not run on Sundays, so a car is less a luxury than a necessity. Petrol is cheaper at the supermarket pumps on the outskirts of Figueres; the village garage charges an extra seven cents and closes for lunch.

When the week ends and suitcases are wedged against crates of cheap Empordà wine, the quickest escape is the same road you arrived on. Turn right at the roundabout, drop down through the olive terraces, and within ten minutes Figueres appears—traffic lights, franchised coffee, the first English-language menu. Behind you Llers will be sweeping the square, lowering the shutters, resetting the bakery clock five minutes slow. Someone wins the card game on the last hand; the dog under the old woman’s arm yaps once, then settles. Nothing happens quickly here, and that, after all, is why you came.