Pau

The wheat fields around Pau turn gold in late June, a colour that makes the Mediterranean look pale when you finally glimpse it from the low ridge above the village. At barely 33 metres above sea level, the place sits so flat in the Empordà plain that the church tower of Sant Llorenç can be spotted from three kilometres away, long before the houses themselves appear. This is farming country first, everything else second.

Pau keeps its back to the sea on purpose. While Roses and Cadaqués fill up with summer rentals, the 500-odd residents here still schedule their day around tractor movements and the grain-drying yard on the edge of town. The result is a working village that happens to be twelve minutes by car from some of the Costa Brava’s emptiest beaches, rather than the other way round. British number plates are rare; Dutch ones rarer. You will hear Catalan in the bar, not Estuary English, and the nearest full-size supermarket is in Figueres, 11 km south.

Stone, Whitewash and the Smell of Soil

The centre is two streets wide. Houses are stone at ground level, whitewashed above, with the occasional blue or green shutter left half-open for ventilation. Nothing is postcard-perfect; paint flakes, geraniums grow in olive-oil tins, and the old men on the bench outside the bakery occupy the same spot their fathers did. The bakery itself opens at 06:30, sells out of coca (a flat, savoury bread topped with vegetables) by 09:00, then shuts. If you want breakfast after that, you drive to Vilajuïga.

The parish church dominates the tiny plaça. Rebuilt piecemeal since the sixteenth century, it mixes Romanesque bones with a Baroque façade slapped on after an earthquake in 1428. Inside, the single nave smells of candle wax and damp stone; the priest still blesses the local tractors every 17 January and the congregation still turns up. Non-Catholics are welcome, but photos during mass will earn a sharp reprimand in Catalan that needs no translation.

Walk fifty metres past the church and asphalt gives way to packed earth. This is where Pau’s real architecture lives: the scattered masías, stone farmhouses built around threshing circles, many dating from the seventeenth century when cereal prices boomed. Some are now weekend places owned by Barcelona architects who keep the stone walls but install glass boxes for pools. Others remain working holdings, with rust-red Massey-Fergusons parked under lean-to roofs and chickens disputing territory with the farm dog. The lane between them is part of the GR-92 footpath; follow it north-east and you reach the coast at Montjoi in two and a half hours, descending through rosemary and abandoned olive terraces until the sea opens out like a blue slammed shutter.

Flat Roads, Slow Bikes and the Tractor Hierarchy

Cycling here is less sport than social observation. The plain is pancake-flat, so even a rusty hire bike will manage 12 km/h. The problem is etiquette: when a tractor comes up behind, the driver expects you to pull into the ditch immediately; fail to do so and you will be overtaken with centimetres to spare while being addressed in language that would make a Barcelona taxi driver blush. Better to stick to the signed “petit recorregut” loop that leaves Pau at the football pitch, threads through almond orchards to the hamlet of Garrigoles, and returns via a farm track where the only hazard is free-range geese.

Serious walkers can use the same paths early morning before the sun climbs above the Pyrenees. There is no shade; take water, a hat, and do not rely on phone signal – the plain acts as a dead zone between the coastal hills and the Albera range. What you get instead is sky, huge and unbroken, and the sound of hoopoes calling from the telegraph wires. October adds stubble fires and the smell of new wine; April brings green wheat and the threat of tramontana, the north wind that can reach 120 km/h and has been known to flip cars on the N-260.

Rice, Oil and the Myth of the Menu del Día

Pau has one bar, two if you count the bakery that serves coffee. Neither offers food after 15:00; dinner means driving. The local rule is simple: lunch in the villages, dinner on the coast. Ten minutes away, Sant Pere Pescador serves arrossejat – rice baked in fish stock so it forms a chewy crust – for €14 including wine. Drive twenty minutes north and you reach El Port de la Selva, where the Thursday market unloads just-caught sardines that restaurants grill over vine cuttings for €6 a portion.

If you insist on eating in Pau, you need to book a table at Cal Titus, a farmhouse turned restaurant on the road to Vilamaniscle. They do classics – escalivada (smoky aubergine and peppers), rabbit with prunes, crema catalana burnt at the table – but only at weekends and only if Titus himself feels like cooking. Call ahead; do not expect a menu in English; bring cash because the card machine “sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t”.

Oil is the other local currency. The cooperative in nearby Espolla presses arbequina olives into a gentle, almond-scented oil that fetches £18 a half-litre in Borough Market. In Pau you buy it from a plastic drum at the petrol station for €8. Same oil, minus the fancy label. The owner will let you taste it on a scrap of bread, but if you ask for “extra-virgin” he will reply, deadpan, “It’s all extra, and it’s all virgin,” then charge you an extra 50 cents for the joke.

When to Come, When to Leave

August is stupidly hot; 38 °C is normal and the village empties as locals head to the coast. August is also when the fiesta major fills one night with fire-crackers and a mobile disco that plays Spanish chart hits until 04:00. If you want authenticity, come then; if you want sleep, book elsewhere. January brings the truffle market in nearby Terrades – black winter truffles, €1 a gram, served on toast with local sparkling wine – but rural B&Bs shut for maintenance and you may find yourself the only guest.

Spring works best. From mid-April the wheat is knee-high, the almonds are in flower and day temperatures hover around 22 °C. The village bakery extends hours; the cooperative wine cellar in Capmany runs free tastings on Fridays; and the coast is ten minutes away if you fancy a swim. Autumn is almost as good, especially late September when the grape harvest starts and the Empordà wineries open their doors for “portes obertes” – free tours, generous measures, no spitting.

Winter is quiet, occasionally bleak. The plain traps cold air; mornings start at 2 °C and the tramontana can keep up for three days straight. Still, hotel rates halve, restaurants will cook whatever you want if you ask politely, and the light over the fields is sharp enough to make a smartphone photo look like Cartier-Bresson. Bring a jumper and do not expect nightlife beyond the bar’s Saturday domino tournament.

The Coast, Yes – But Later

Drive east on the C-68 and the sea appears so suddenly you wonder why you bothered with inland villages at all. Roses bay curves like a scooped-out avocado stone, the water a hard turquoise that makes Cornwall look wishy-washy. But come back to Pau at dusk, when the tractors have parked and the only sound is the church bell counting the hour, and you remember why the village refuses to market itself. It already has what the coast has lost: rhythm measured by seasons, not by booking calendars, and the certainty that tomorrow the wheat will still be growing whether or not anyone stops to photograph it.