La Nou de Berguedà

The morning flight from Gatwick lands in Barcelona at 10:15; by midday the hire-car thermometer already reads 32 °C on the airport slip-road. Two motorways and one mountain later, exactly ninety minutes north, it has dropped fourteen degrees. That is the first thing La Nou de Berguedà does—cools you down without asking.

The village sits on a ridge above the Baells reservoir, a handful of stone houses and a church tower arranged around a single loop of tarmac. There is no petrol station, no cash-point, no souvenir shop. What there is instead is altitude: 876 m according to the road sign, high enough for Scots pines to outnumber palms and for the evening air to smell of damp earth and wood-smoke even in July.

Stone, slate and silence

Houses are built from the mountain’s own palette: grey granite below, dark slate above, timber balconies painted the dusty greens and burgundies you see on shuttered farmhouses in Snowdonia. Most date from the early 1900s, rebuilt after the phylloxera blight wiped out the lower vineyards and pushed families uphill into livestock. Walk the narrow lanes at siesta time and the only sound is the occasional clank of a cowbell from a garden stable or the beep of a reversing tractor delivering hay bales. Traffic volume is so low that children play hopscotch on the main street; British parents accustomed to pavement vigilance find themselves relaxing long before the first cider appears.

The parish church of Sant Martí keeps watch from the highest point. It is not medieval grandeur—the building was refurbished in 1948 after a fire—but its porch still bears the stone crest of the local land-owning family and the bell still tolls the hour five minutes early, a habit villagers refuse to correct. Step inside and the temperature drops another three degrees; the interior smells of wax and the faint iron tang of mountain water that seeps through the walls every spring.

Paths that leave the phone behind

La Nou works best as a base-camp rather than a checklist. Six way-marked footpaths leave the square, ranging from a twenty-minute wander to an abandoned lime kiln to a full-day haul along the GR-241 to the limestone wall of Pedraforca, the 2 497 m peak that dominates every postcard sold thirty kilometres away in Berga. The most popular loop, the 7 km Ruta de les Fonts, threads through pine and beech woods to three natural springs where you can refill bottles; the water is cold enough to make fillings ache and tastes faintly of moss. Way-marking is scrupulous until the forest crown, after which you navigate by cairns and instinct—phone signal dies within five minutes of the last house, so download the track before you set off.

Mountain bikers use the same web of farm tracks. gradients rarely drop below 6 %, which means thighs burn on the way up and brakes smoke on the way down. Meet a local and they will probably be on an e-bike; batteries are rented by the day from the hardware shop in Gironella (15 min drive, €25, cash only).

Food built for altitude

There is one restaurant, Fonda Camprubí, open Thursday to Sunday for lunch and Friday plus Saturday for dinner. The weekday menú del dia costs €14 and follows the Catalan mountain formula: hearty soup, grilled meat, custard dessert, half-bottle of wine included. Vegetarians get escalivada (roasted aubergine and pepper) and a lecture on the nutritional value of chickpeas. Ingredients arrive from the valley below—no sea fish here, but trinxat (cabbage, potato and bacon hash) appears every Thursday and the local sausage butifarra is grilled over holm-oak embers that perfume the dining room. If you are self-catering, Berga’s Friday market sells Cheddar-style goat cheese and surprisingly good cansalada that fries like British streaky. Bring bags; stall-holders still weigh produce on cast-iron scales and charge by the quarter kilo.

Seasons that change the rules

April brings wild asparagus along the verges and enough daylight for an after-supper stroll at eight; by May the surrounding meadows are loud with nightingales. June is perfect until the last weekend, when Spanish schools break up and every cottage suddenly fills with three-generation families. July and August stay dry, but nights drop to 14 °C—pack a fleece alongside the swimsuit you will not use. September is mushroom month; rovellons (saffron milk-caps) appear after the first storms and the village smells of garlic and parsley as locals fry their catch on outdoor gas rings. October turns the beech woods copper; morning mist pools in the valley so that La Nou feels like an island until the sun burns through. November ushers in the fiesta major of Sant Martí: a communal paella, a brass band that has clearly practised since last year, and a lottery wheel where the top prize is a ham leg strung with a red ribbon. Winter arrives overnight—one December the thermometer read –9 °C at dusk—and with it the possibility of snow. Roads are gritted promptly, but the final 6 km from the C-16 is single-track with passing bays; meet a timber lorry and you will be reversing uphill in the dark. Chains live in car boots from December to March.

Getting there, staying there

No bus climbs the last hill; the nearest railway is Barcelona–Puigcerdà, getting off at Berga then taxi (€35 pre-booked). Car hire is therefore essential—compact manuals cope better with the hairpins than the automatic tanks handed out at airport upgrades. Accommodation is almost entirely self-catering stone cottages renovated by weekenders from Barcelona; expect wood-burning stoves, patchy Wi-Fi and instructions to separate rubbish into five colour-coded bins. Prices swing from €90 a night in March to €180 over New Year when the village fills with skiers heading to La Molina half an hour away. Book early for September mushroom weekends and the December long weekend—Spaniards take Constitution Day very seriously.

The honest verdict

La Nou de Berguedà will not change your life. It offers no Michelin stars, no flamenco shows, no swimming pool except the reservoir far below. What it does offer is a quick antidote to Costa overload: cool air, quiet lanes, walks that start at your front door and a bar where the owner remembers how you like your coffee on the second morning. Come for three nights and you might stay four; stay for four and you will probably find yourself pricing stone cottages on the flight home. Just remember to fill up in Berga, download the map and bring cash—because the nearest cash-point is seventeen kilometres back down the mountain, and reversing for a bus in the dark is nobody’s idea of a holiday highlight.