Sales de Llierca

The valley opens like a secret handshake. One moment you're winding through oak forest on the GI-524, the next the road drops and there's Sales de Llierca – 167 souls scattered across stone farmhouses, the Llierca river glinting 260 metres below. No town square, no promenade, just terraces of almond and olive stitched together by dry-stone walls that have outlasted every guidebook.

This is the Garrotxa that coach parties miss. While they head north to the volcanoes near Olot, the lower valley keeps its back turned, doing what it has always done: growing hazelnuts, grazing goats, sending mushrooms to market in Olot every Tuesday. The church bell still rings for agricultural hours, not tourist photo ops. If you arrive after dusk, don't expect streetlights – the village trusts the moon and the white noise of water over rock.

Most visitors come with walking boots and a hire car. Fly into Girona on the morning Ryanair from Stansted and you can be parking beside the river by lunchtime. From Barcelona it's ninety minutes up the C-66, but the Girona route saves tolls and treats you to the sudden canyon at Les Encies, where the road slices through basalt columns like a knife through chocolate cake.

Following the Water

The Llierca river is the village's architect. It carved the gorge that shelters the houses, turned the grain mills that once earned Sales its living, and still dictates the daily rhythm: cool air sliding down the valley at dawn, the smell of wet stone rising as the sun hits the water. Walk upstream on the old miners' path and you'll reach the desfiladero de Mont-ral, a limestone slot so narrow that kingfishers ricochet between the walls like blue bullets. After rain the path disappears underwater; locals just shrug and turn back – the gorge belongs to the river, not to hikers.

Downstream is gentler. A thirty-minute stroll brings you to the natural swimming hole known as the Gorg de la Plana. The water is tea-coloured from the peat upstream, but clean enough that dragonflies lay eggs on your rucksack if you leave it on the bank. In July the temperature creeps to twenty degrees – chilly by Costa Brava standards, perfect when the valley hits thirty by ten o'clock. Weekends see families from Olot, mid-week you might share it with a shepherd and his dogs.

Eating Like You Mean It

Sales doesn't do restaurants with English menus. Can Serola, the only place open year-round, writes the day's offering on a blackboard: trinxat (think Catalan bubble-and-squeak), river trout if the night's fishing went well, and a roast chicken that arrives spitting garlic and rosemary. The three-course menú del día costs €16 and they'll swap the beans for peas without asking why. Wine comes in a glass bottle with no label – local garnatxa that stains the lips purple and makes the drive back to the cottage feel shorter than it is.

For breakfast, Bar Cal Jepi on the GI-524 serves filter coffee, a rarity in rural Catalonia where espresso is religion. Pair it with a toasted baguette, butter and peach jam while truck drivers discuss the price of feed barley. The bakery in the hamlet of Palou opens twice a week; get there early for coca de llardons, a sweet flatbread scattered with crispy pork fat that tastes better than it sounds.

Self-caterers should stock up in Olot before arrival. Sales has a tiny shop that sells tinned tuna, local cheese and not much else. The nearest petrol pump is fifteen kilometres away – another reason the valley remains soundtracked by crickets rather than engines.

Stone, Snow and Silence

The village's highest houses sit at 400 metres, high enough that January sometimes brings snow while orange trees still fruit down by the river. British owners who bought ruined masías talk about waking to white-capped Pyrenees framed by the bedroom window, the air so clear they can see the ski runs at La Molina forty kilometres away. Summer mornings are for walking before nine; by noon the sun ricochets off the stone and even the lizards seek shade inside the hollow walls.

There are no signed footpaths in the municipality itself – just farm tracks that double as goat thoroughfares. One leads east to the 12th-century chapel of Sant Aniol d'Aguja, eight kilometres through holm oak and then a final scramble to a hermitage wedged beneath a cliff. Legend says a Moorish princess founded it after converting to Christianity; today's pilgrims are more likely to be carrying energy bars than Bibles. Take water – the spring halfway is reliable in May, dry by August.

Cyclists find the valley a perfect training ground. The road to Olot climbs 300 metres in eight kilometres, with gradients that never bite too hard and views that make the pain feel worthwhile. Mountain bikers have web of forestry tracks; download the GPS tracks from the Garrotxa tourist office or risk endless loops of pine and confusion. Either way, expect to share the trail with wild boar – they hear tyres and melt into the undergrowth, leaving only hoofprints the size of a child's fist.

When to Come, When to Leave

April turns the valley neon green, the almond blossom already blown away but the poplars still wearing their spring yellow like teenagers in trainers. It's the best month for walking without crowds; you might meet one retired couple from Toulouse and a local collecting wild asparagus. October trades green for copper, the chestnut harvest in full swing and the air suddenly sharp enough to make you reach for a jumper at dusk. Both months average 18 °C at midday – T-shirt weather for Brits, jacket weather for Catalans.

August is hot, often 32 °C by eleven, but the valley's altitude knocks the edge off the coast's humidity. Start walks at seven, retreat to the stone cottage for siesta, re-emerge at five when the sun slips behind the ridge and the river turns silver again. Mid-winter can be magical if you catch snow – the gorge becomes a muted cathedral of white and grey – but the single-track road from the GI-524 isn't gritted. Chains or a sturdy hire car are non-negotiable.

Sales de Llierca doesn't sell itself. There are no souvenir tea towels, no guided tours, no gift shop selling volcanic rock paperweights. What it offers instead is rhythm: the clank of goat bells moving uphill at dawn, the smell of woodsmoke drifting across terraces, a night sky still dark enough to see Andromeda without squinting. Come prepared to slow down, to speak at least enough Catalan to order coffee, and to measure your days by river sound rather than screen time. Leave before you start taking it for granted – the valley notices, and it doesn't forgive complacency.