Bordils

The Saturday-morning queue outside Forn Pa de Bordils starts at half past eight. By nine, the village bakery has sold half its stock of coca de sucre—a brittle, olive-oil-flecked flatbread buried under sugar and pine nuts—and the car park behind the church is thick with the smell of warm dough and tractor diesel. This is Bordils: 1,794 inhabitants, 42 m above sea level, and exactly the sort of place guidebooks skip because nobody has worked out how to monetise a farmers’ market that still weighs tomatoes on cast-iron scales last polished in 1978.

A plain that forgot to be flat

Stand on the raised river path west of the church and the Empordà tableland rolls away like a crumpled tablecloth. Irrigation ditches—some Roman, some dug last century—glint between fields of lettuces that change colour weekly: lime, emerald, bruised purple when the tractors turn the soil. The Ter slips past slowly, carrying herons downstream towards Girona, ten kilometres south. Cyclists use the dirt levee as a speedway; walkers keep to the narrower track that shadows it, dodging the occasional Seat Ibiza whose owner has misjudged gate width and ended up axle-deep in mud.

There are no viewpoints, no Instagram platforms, no ticket booths. Just the plain, the river and the Gavarres hills bruising the horizon. On hazy days you can pick out the Pyrenees; on clear ones, the radar dome above Begur. Either way, the soundtrack is identical: a low mechanical hum from the fields, the clack of a sprinkler line, someone shouting in Catalan that the tomàquets are ready.

Romanesque at village scale

The parish church of Sant Martí squats in the old centre like a stone toad. It is neither large nor ornate: a single nave, a bell turret added after lightning split the original in 1615, a door carved with a dragon so eroded it looks more like a startled hare. Step inside and the temperature drops five degrees; the air smells of candle wax and the previous Sunday’s lilies. Nobody will offer you an audio guide. If the door is locked—the rector keeps farmer’s hours—ask in the café opposite; they keep a spare key in a margarine tub labelled “Clau de l’església” and will hand it over without a deposit or a form.

Round the back, the cemetery walls are studded with 18th-century masia stones rescued from demolished farmhouses. Read the inscriptions and you realise every family in the village has at least three surnames; spelling alters by a letter each generation, so Rovira becomes Rovires then Rovires again. It is history written by people who never expected a stranger to read it.

Pedal, stroll, then stop for chips

Bordils makes no claim to be a cycling “hub”, yet the surrounding grid of caminos rurales is catnip for anyone who dislikes hills. Head north and you can freewheel through Celrà to the old railway line that now forms part of the Ruta del Ter—flat, tarmacked, shaded by plane trees. Southwards, a twenty-minute spin lands you in Girona’s medieval quarter; eastwards, another twenty puts you on the beach at Sant Feliu de Guíxols if the tramuntana wind isn’t blowing.

Walkers do better to ignore the maps and follow the irrigation channels. A three-kilometre loop starts behind the football pitch, crosses a plank bridge wide enough for one cow, then skirts a field of calçots (the spring onion that Catalans barbecue into blackened sweetness). You will meet dog-walkers, a man collecting wild asparagus in a plastic Lidl bag, and zero other tourists. Take water; there are no kiosks, only the occasional garden tap labelled “potable” in fading marker pen.

Market day arithmetic

Saturday is the village’s weekly pulse. Stalls open at eight, close at noon, and obey an unspoken hierarchy: vegetables first, then cheese, then the van that sells knickers three pairs for five euros. The formatge stall offers a goat’s gouda so mild it could convert the most committed cheddar loyalist; the honey man keeps a clipboard where regulars sign up for orange-blossom before the bees have finished making it. Prices are scribbled on scraps of cardboard and rounded up or down depending on how many coins the vendor can be bothered to count.

Bring cash. The nearest ATM is in Flaçà, four kilometres away, and the bakery card machine has been “broken” since 2019. A loaf of pa de pagès, a strip of coca, and a coffee in the square set you back €4.30—roughly the price of a single flat white in Shoreditch.

When the fiesta forgets to sleep

Every third weekend in August Bordils swaps diesel for gunpowder. The Festa Major begins with a cercavila—a procession of giants, drums and small children dressed as lettuces—then accelerates through sardanes, castellers and a correfoc that sends devils with fireworks sprinting past the supermarket at midnight. The bakery reopens at five in the morning to sell sugary recovery bread; the bar stays open straight through.

Book early. There are no hotels in the village itself: accommodation is two rural houses and a handful of Airbnb rooms above someone’s aunt. Mis-read the map and you can end up paying Girona city prices for a bedroom that overlooks the municipal tractor shed. Earplugs help; so does accepting that sleep is not the point.

The practical bit, woven in

Bordils has no railway station despite the old freight sign that fools at least one visitor each month. A hire car from Girona airport (20 min) is simplest; parking on Carrer Major is free and unrestricted, though Saturday mornings resemble a Tetris board. If you must use public transport, a regional bus runs twice daily from Girona’s Estació d’Autobusos—times coincide with market opening and closing, an accident someone in the council clearly finds amusing.

Eating options are limited but honest. Can Xapa serves a three-course lunch menu for €14; grilled chicken and chips appear without embarrassment if the calçots look too alien. Café de la Plaça will fry bacon and eggs on request, though the beans come from a Heinz tin kept specifically for Brits. Evening meals finish by ten; after that, the only activity is the bench outside the bakery where teenagers compare mopeds.

Sunday is a ghost day. The bakery shutters at one on Saturday and stays closed until seven Monday, so buy your breakfast coca in advance. The supermarket on the roundabout—Esclat/BonPreu, open until nine, including Sunday—sells sliced pan de molde for emergency toast, but you will pay 30 cents extra for the indignity.

A plain-spoken farewell

Bordils will not change your life. It offers no ruins to tick off, no viewpoints to selfie, no souvenir shops flamenco-ing for your euros. What it does offer is a slice of rural Catalonia that still functions for locals first and visitors second: a place where bread is sold by grandmothers who remember when the river flooded the square, and where the loudest noise at night is sometimes a tractor heading home long after the driver should have been in bed. Come for the market, stay for the flat lanes, and leave before you start recognising the dogs by name.