Sant Mori

The church bell in Sant Mori strikes thirteen. No one flinches; the mechanism has been stuck on an extra beat since 1987. It is the loudest thing that will happen all day.

At 51 metres above sea level, this scatter of stone houses and barns feels lower than it is. The land around it has been scraped flat by centuries of cereal ploughs, so the modest bell-tower still manages to rule the horizon. From the single bench on the tiny plaça you can watch tractors drift home along lanes that disappear into wheat the colour of pale ale. The only other movement is a pair of red kites circling over the cork oaks, waiting for the combine harvester to flush out supper.

A village that forgot to grow

Sant Mori never quite got round to the 20th century, let alone the 21st. Electricity arrived in 1958; the village shop still shuts for three hours every afternoon because the owner drives home to cook lunch for her mother. There are no souvenir stalls, no guided walks, no glossy menus in six languages. TripAdvisor lists 21 reviews – roughly the same number of permanent residents who still remember when Franco’s police rode through on horseback.

What you get instead is a textbook example of rural Ampordanese architecture: stone portals with wedge-shaped keystones, iron balconies the colour of burnt toast, and walls thick enough to swallow mobile signal. The streets are barely two donkeys wide; vines droop over them like untidy curtains, dripping grapes onto the bonnets of hire cars that squeeze through once a week. Park outside the walls and walk. The entire hamlet takes nine minutes to cross, unless you stop to read the 18th-century gravestones stacked against the church wall like loose paving slabs.

Inside the church, the air smells of candle wax and damp sandstone. A single fresco fragment – a medieval saint with a chipped nose – survives in a side chapel. No rope, no label, no QR code. You could reach out and touch it, though the elderly woman who appears from nowhere to lock up at dusk would rather you didn’t.

The edible hinterland

Food is not the reason people come to Sant Mori; it is the reason they stay an extra night. The castle restaurant – housed in a fortified farmhouse whose foundations date from 1043 – serves a set dinner that changes according to whatever the chef’s father grew that morning. Expect leek-and-potato soup thick enough to stand a spoon in, followed by rice that behaves more like a risotto than a Valencian paella, and lamb so local it was probably called something. Pudding is recuit, a fresh sheep-milk curd that tastes like Greek yoghurt that has been to finishing school, drizzled with honey from hives parked among the rosemary behind the car park. Three courses, water, wine and coffee: €28. They still prefer cash; the card machine is “having a rest”.

Breakfast is harder. The village shop opens at nine, but bread does not arrive until the baker’s van toots at half past. If you miss it, drive 12 km to L’Armentera where the supermarket sells crusty baguettes that taste of absolutely nothing. Stock up in Figueres on the way in and you can avoid this daily drama.

Lanes that reward laziness

Sant Mori sits on a lattice of farm tracks that fan out across the Empordà plain like bicycle spokes. The land is gently rumpled rather than hilly, so a half-day loop to neighbouring villages demands more curiosity than calf power. Head south-east and you reach the ruins of Sant Martí d’Empúries, where Greeks landed 2,600 years ago and left behind a scatter of marble columns that children now use as picnic tables. The route is 18 km there and back, almost pancake-flat, with tarmac so quiet you can hear lizards scuttling into the verges. Take water – the only bar en route opens when the owner wakes up, rarely before eleven.

Mountain bikers looking for adrenaline will be disappointed; the biggest climb is a motorway bridge. Road cyclists, on the other hand, rave about the secondary roads that link Sant Mori to Viladamat, Albons and Ventalló. Traffic is light enough to ride two abreast, though locals still wave at anything on wheels as if it were 1953. In August the heat shimmers off the tarmac by ten o’clock; start early or risk melting into the white lines.

When the village remembers it has neighbours

The calendar here is stubbornly agricultural. June brings the feast of Sant Mori, patron saint and convenient excuse for a Saturday night dance in the plaça. A sound system the size of a Transit van arrives on the back of an actual Transit van; someone’s uncle plays Catalan rock from 1982 until the Guardia Civil turn up to remind them about noise regulations. In August the fiesta major repeats the formula with added paella pan the diameter of a satellite dish. Both events are aimed at locals, not visitors, which is precisely why outsiders find them fascinating. Bring your own chair.

Autumn smells of crushed grapes and diesel exhaust as the harvest convoy rumbles in. Most grapes travel to cooperative cellars in Vilajuïga or Espolla, but a few rows behind the castle are kept for the restaurant’s house red – a light, peppery garnatxa that costs €12 a bottle and will ruin you for supermarket Rioja. If you want to watch the process, ask politely; the family still strip vines by hand and are happy to let you snip bunches until your back aches.

The practical bit you cannot ignore

Sant Mori is not on the way to anywhere. The nearest railway station is 20 km away in Figueres, and the only bus leaves at 7.15 am, returning at siesta time – unless it is Sunday, when it does not run at all. A car is essential; the last 6 km weave through fields frequented by stray dogs and the occasional free-range cow. Sat-nav will tell you to turn down a track that ends in a drainage ditch. Ignore it, keep going, look for the castle tower poking above the poplars.

Accommodation is limited to four self-catering flats inside the castle walls and a handful of villa rentals scattered through the farmland. Prices start at €90 a night for two, rising to €350 for a six-bedroom farmhouse with pool. August books out a year in advance for weddings; if you object to Abba covers echoing across the wheat, come in May or late September instead.

Cash remains king. Bar Sant Mori will accept euros prised from a reluctant foreign card, but the castle restaurant prefers notes you can crumple. There is no ATM; the nearest hole-in-the-wall is back on the main road towards Figueres, beside a petrol station that sells jamon-flavoured crisps and little else.

Leaving without clicking ‘like’

Sant Mori will not change your life. It will not provide the photograph that breaks Instagram. What it offers is the rare sensation of a place that has not yet worked out what tourists want, and therefore gives you what it has: silence, stone, soup at cost price, and a bell that can’t even tell the right time. Drive away at dusk, past the cemetery where plastic flowers fade to the same colour as the soil, and the village shrinks in the rear-view mirror until only the tower remains. Ten minutes later you hit the C-31 back to the coast. The traffic roars, the billboards reappear, and the 21st century snaps shut like a book you were halfway through.