Portbou

The railway station dominates everything. Built for an age when borders mattered, its iron canopies and yellow brick warehouses stretch half a kilometre along the coast, far longer than the actual town. Arrive by train and you step straight onto platform 1, the Mediterranean glinting twenty metres away, France another twenty beyond that. The loudspeaker still crackles in four languages, though these days it mainly announces delays rather than passport checks.

Portbou sits at the only point where the Pyrenees meet salt water. Mountains rise straight from the harbour; the high-speed track to Paris is pinned to the cliff with Victorian masonry. It gives the place a makeshift feel, as though someone laid a frontier post on a rock face and the houses grew around it because there was nowhere else to go. The permanent population is barely a thousand, small enough that the baker recognises strangers after the second morning.

The Station That Built the Town

Walk the length of the platforms and you clock the geography lesson. Spanish broad gauge ends here; French standard gauge starts fifty metres further on. For a century every wagon had to be jacked up and its bogies swapped while passengers drank ersatz coffee in the waiting hall. Franco’s customs officers worked the south end, the Gendarmerie the north, and between them lay a no-man’s-land of porters, cigarette sellers and spies. The murals in the underpass – black-and-white photographs blown up to wall size – show exhausted Republican families boarding refugee trains in February 1939. Their suitcases are rope-tied, their eyes already looking away from Spain.

Most of the sidings are rusted now. RENFE runs only six stopping trains a day, and the overnight Talgo to Paris was withdrawn in 2020. Yet the station remains the town’s civic centre. Elderly men still gather on the marble benches at 11 a.m. to read El Punt Avui, and the best coffee is poured from a hatch inside the ticket hall. Try to leave without checking the timetable and you feel vaguely disloyal.

A Philosopher’s Dead End

Ten minutes east, a steel staircase drilled into the cliff descends towards the Walter Benjamin Memorial. The German critic reached Portbou in September 1940 with a US visa in his pocket and a belief that the worst was over. Franco's police threatened to return him to Vichy France; he took morphium that night in the Hotel de Francia, room 3. The memorial – a narrow shaft of oxidised iron – drops you towards the waves with nothing but air on three sides. Half-way down you stand level with the rocks; the sea booms upwards like a drum. It is the rawest piece of public art on the Costa Brava: no plaques, no flags, just the name “BENJAMIN” cut through the metal so the horizon shows through.

Afterwards you can climb back to the cemetery where he was buried in a common grave. The location is faultless: mountains at your shoulders, the railway cutting below, the bay opening towards Cerbère. Someone leaves yellow roses on the slab; someone else has scrawled “No pasarán” in UV pen that only shows when the sun hits.

Shingle, Salt and Silence

The town beach, Platja Gran, is a five-minute shuffle downhill. Forget sand – it’s grey slate shingle the size of pound coins. Bring rubber shoes or adopt the local waddle: heels down, grimace, hop quickly into the transparent water. A single breakwater gives shelter, though when the tramuntana blows (and it blows hard) lifegoes flag red and even the fishermen stay indoors. At dusk the surface turns oily-calm and you can watch the anchovy boats chug in, gulls pirouetting above the rigging. Their catch is auctioned at 7 p.m. in a breeze-block shed that smells of diesel and iodine; visitors are welcome but prices are shouted in Catalan and settled in cash.

Smaller coves lie north along the coastal path. Cala Rovellada is twenty minutes of steep steps and scree; you’ll share it with maybe two locals and a determined French snorkeller. The water is colder than at Lloret, clearer than Menorca, and deep enough to see sargo nibbling sea grass five metres down. Take water – there’s nothing except a rusted lifebuoy and someone’s forgotten flip-flop.

Eating (Early, Simply, Close By)

Portbou never bought into the Costa Brava gastronomy boom. Dinner options are thin after 9.30 p.m. and the Michelin map gives up at the frontier. What exists is honest, cheap and geared to people who lift nets for a living. On the promenade Voramar grills whatever came off the boats: anchovies a la plancha (€8), squid with a lemon wedge, chips that arrive in a silver tin. Casa David, up in the old quarter, serves calçots in season, charred black and peeled at the table, the sweet onion dipped in romesco that stains every chin. Locals order the €12 menú del día – three courses, carafe of wine, bread – and are back at work within the hour. Vegetarians get omelette or… omelette. Bring a phrasebook; English is understood less than in Barcelona and the waiter will still pretend not to hear if you mispronounce “sense ceba”.

Walking the Line

The GR 92 long-distance footpath cuts straight through town. South-east it climbs 350 m to the Coll de Frare, then drops to empty coves where 1930s republican bunkers slump into the maquis. North-west you reach Cerbère in forty minutes, passing a frontier stone dated 1868 and an EU plaque that feels almost quaint. Carry passport – French police sometimes patrol the ridge and they’re unimpressed by photos on a phone. If the weather behaves (spring or late September) the route is spectacular: cobalt water on one side, cork oak and rosemary on the other, the track so narrow you half expect a smuggler round each bend.

Winter is quieter still but brings risk. The tramuntana can hit 120 km/h, shutting the railway tunnel and whipping up waves that explode over the sea wall. Several B&As close November–March; buses replace trains at short notice. Summer, by contrast, sees French day-trippers arrive on the 10.23 from Perpignan, fill two café terraces, and leave on the 16.47. They buy nothing except pa amb tomàquet and bottled water, yet locals insist they prefer the brief invasion to the building sites of Roses or Empuriabrava.

Last Train, Last Call

Stay overnight and you notice the curfew logic of a frontier. Bars call last orders when the final Barcelona train clears the tunnel at 22.18. Shutters roll down, the streetlights flicker and the only sound is the freight line humming as aluminium wagons clank towards Genoa. From the hotel balcony you look across a pitch-black bay to the orange glow of Cerbère, so close you could swim the distance in twenty minutes, so politically distant it needs a passport.

Leave next morning with change in your pocket and you’ll still hear the stationmaster’s whistle in your head. Portbou doesn’t woo visitors; it processes them, has done since 1878. Most travellers sprint for the connecting train, but linger an hour and the town reveals its stubborn contract: no sand, no boutiques, no cocktail hour – just rock, salt wind and the memory of everyone who passed through because they had nowhere else to stop.