Montmajor

The bar shuts when the last farmer finishes his coffee. That could be three in the afternoon or six in the evening, depending on livestock, weather and mood. In Montmajor, population 478, the timetable is not negotiable.

This scatter of stone farms sits 756 m up on the first ripple of the Catalan Pre-Pyrenees, 20 minutes’ drive north of Berga. From the C-16 motorway you climb the BV-4246, a road that coils through holm-oak forest until the valley opens into a shallow bowl of cereal fields and cow pastures. Mobile signal returns only at the top of each hairpin; by the time you reach the village square it has usually given up again.

Stone, Silence and a 523-Mushroom Museum

Most visitors come for the Museu d’Art del Bolet, housed in the old market hall on Plaça del Mercat. Inside are 523 hand-painted mushroom models: scarlet fly agaric, porcelain-white porcini, lurid purple milk-cap. The collection is the labour of one local pharmacist who began painting fungi in the 1970s and never stopped. Entry is €3, children free, and the caretaker will switch on the lights if you knock on the adjoining house. TripAdvisor calls it “bizarre but oddly fascinating”; the English couple who arrived in wellies last October simply said “better than the National Gallery” and asked where they could buy a set for the garden shed.

Away from the museum, the village is a short story rather than a novel. The Romanesque church of Sant Esteve stands at the highest point, its bell tower patched with brick after a lightning strike in 1894. A slow circuit takes eight minutes: past the manor house of Can Roca (1706, still owned by the same family), past the stone bench where old women shell peas on summer evenings, past the village pump that advertises “aigua potable” in peeling blue tiles. There is no souvenir shop, no cash machine, no chemist. What there is instead is sound: swallows in the eaves, a tractor in low gear, the hollow clop of a horse being led home from the fields.

Walking Without Waymarks

Montmajor’s real territory begins where the tarmac ends. A lattice of farm tracks links more than forty masias, the dispersed farmsteads that have shaped life here since the Middle Ages. Most are still working holdings: stone barns, haylofts balanced on mushroom-shaped columns, courtyards where geese hiss at strangers. One or two have been restored as weekend retreats by Barcelona families; their freshly sand-blasted walls stand out like new teeth.

The easiest circuit starts behind the church and follows the GR-241 footpath south-west for 5 km, dropping through wheat stubble and holm-oak shade before climbing back past Masia Can Piqué. On a clear day you can pick out the jagged outline of Pedraforca, the mountain that appears on every Catalan school textbook, and the white limestone wall of the Cadí range beyond. The walk is undemanding – 150 m of ascent, three hours at picnic pace – but carry water: the only fountain is at kilometre three and tastes strongly of iron.

Cyclists use the same lanes as part of a longer 45 km loop that swings down to the Cardener river and back via the hamlet of Sagàs. Traffic is light – you will meet more goats than cars – but the gradients bite. Road shoes are fine; legs that have spent winter on the turbo trainer may not be.

Food That Arrives on Hooves, Not Deliveroo

Self-catering is the default. The village shop opens Tuesday and Friday mornings, sells tinned tuna, tetrabrik wine and locally made honey whose label reads simply “Muntanya”. For anything perishable you need to have stopped in Berga: the Mercadona there has a British section complete with Marmite and Yorkshire tea, should homesickness strike.

The only restaurant, Serracanya, is a converted barn on the road out to Sant Maurici. It fires the grill at weekends or whenever five people phone ahead. The €18 menú del dia is mountain pork, roasted over vine cuttings and served with potatoes that taste of the earth they came from. Portions are large enough to split between two children; vegetarians get escalivada – aubergine and peppers blackened in the same embers. House wine arrives in a porró, the Catalan glass-spouted jug that demands steady nerves and good biceps.

If you are staying in one of the farm B&Bs, breakfast will be eggs laid that morning, bread toasted on the open fire, and pa amb tomàquet: half a tomato rubbed across crusty loaf, drizzled with local arbequina oil and sprinkled with salt. It sounds basic until you taste it; then you wonder why every British café insists on avocado.

When the Valley Turns White

Winter arrives overnight, usually between the Day of the Dead and the first Barcelona derby of November. Night-time temperatures drop below zero, the puddles on the church square freeze, and the GR-241 becomes a ribbon of packed snow. The handful of permanent residents burn oak in open hearths; smoke drifts across the stone roofs at head height. Driving is possible – the council grits the main road at dawn – but British visitors who arrive in October half-term expecting “a bit of Spanish sun” have been known to leave early, defeated by ice on the inside of the windows.

By April the fields turn emerald with new wheat and the cowbells move higher up the slope. Wild orchids appear beside the track to Can Roca; nightingales reclaim the mulberry trees. This is the sweetest time to come, before the Barcelona families descend for the long May weekend and drive the price of cottages from €90 to €140 a night.

How to Fall Off the Grid (Responsibly)

There is no railway station; the last bus left in 1997. Hire a car at Barcelona airport, take the C-16 towards Andorra and exit at Berga. From there the BV-4246 is signposted “Montmajor 19 km”. Allow 40 minutes – the sat-nav will promise 25, but it has never met a combine harvester round a blind bend. Parking is wherever you can squeeze a Fiesta: the square, the church slope, or beside the recycling bins that smell faintly of the local distillery.

Phone reception is patchy; WhatsApp works if you stand on the church steps and face north. The village Wi-Fi covers the square only and times out after 30 minutes, just long enough to post a photograph of Pedraforca glowing pink at sunset and watch the envy accumulate.

Leave the mushrooms in the ground unless you can tell a cep from a death cap. Collecting without a permit risks a €300 fine, and the local pharmacist who painted 523 fungi has seen every excuse going.

Check-Out Time

Montmajor will not change your life. It offers no infinity pool, no Michelin star, no flamenco show. What it does offer is a place where the day is still measured by church bells and the length of a farmer’s shadow. Stay three nights: walk the loop, eat pork, count the mushrooms. On the fourth morning drive back down the mountain, rejoin the motorway and discover that your phone has 127 unread messages. The signal feels louder than the church bells ever did.