Sant Martí Vell

The church bell strikes once—maybe twice—then stops. Nobody checks their watch. In Sant Martí Vell, time is kept by tractors coughing to life at dawn and by swifts that whip between stone roofs at dusk. With 242 residents, the hamlet doesn’t do schedules.

Fifteen minutes’ drive west of Girona airport, the C-66 slips into low-lying farmland. Turn off at Quart, follow the GI-664 for four kilometres, and the road narrows to a single lane scalloped into bedrock. You park where the tarmac ends; anything wider than a Fiesta risks scraping dry-stone walls older than the Tudors.

A Roofline That Hasn’t Changed Since 1284

The first thing you notice is the bell tower—square, unadorned, almost English in its restraint. The parish church of Sant Martí began life as a Romanesque cell in the 13th century and grew by accretion: a Gothic arch here, a Baroque altarpiece there, like generations adding coats to a peg. The door is usually open mid-morning; by 2 p.m. the key holder, a wiry farmer in muddy boots, has gone back to his vines. Inside, the air smells of candle wax and damp sandstone. Light falls through slits barely wider than a arrow loop, picking out a wooden Christ whose paint has blistered away in exactly the places you would expect human skin to wear thin.

Radiating from the church are three lanes—Carrer Major, Carrer de la Font, Carrer de l’Església—each barely the width of a sheep cart. Houses are golden-brown blocks quarried from the surrounding hills, their roofs tiled in faded terracotta the colour of Staffordshire plant pots. Ivy doesn’t so much climb as drape, and every second doorway hides a pocket courtyard where a motorbike leans against a 16th-century drinking trough. Nothing is “restored”; it is simply kept going, the architectural equivalent of darning socks.

Walk, Then Sit

You can circumnavigate the built-up bit in twelve minutes, but that misses the point. Tracks strike out into cereal fields that flip from emerald in March to biscuit gold by June. One path, signed simply “a Madremanya”, climbs a low ridge through holm-oak scrub. After twenty minutes the village shrinks to a Lego cluster and the Pyrenees float up on the horizon like a row of broken teeth. Turn back when the trail forks; the far side drops into a thicket where mobile signal gives up completely.

Pace is everything. Locals walk the lanes at funeral speed, nodding “bon dia” without breaking stride. Try to power-walk and you will feel ridiculous. The correct rhythm is: glance at vegetable plot, comment (internally) on the size of the onions, stop to read the marble war memorial, listen for the creak of a weather vane. Then sit. The stone bench outside the church faces west; at 6 p.m. the sun hits it full on, warm enough for shirtsleeves well into October. Bring a paperback or simply watch swallows rehearse their evening routine. There is no café, no bar, no gift shop—just a vending machine in a recess that dispenses 50-cent espressos in paper thimbles. It works; trust it.

What You Won’t Find (and Why That’s Fine)

No souvenir stalls. No guided tours. No tasting menus. The nearest cashpoint is back in Quart; the last ATM in the village was bricked up when the bank pulled out in 2009. Parking is free but spaces equal the number of letterboxes—arrive after 11 a.m. on a festival day and you’ll be reversing uphill for ten minutes.

Rain can turn the lanes into a slick cobbled slide; grippy soles are non-negotiable. And if you need the loo, the public facility is a single ceramic cubicle behind the town hall—spotlessly clean, but locked at dusk because the key lives with the mayor.

Eating: Bring the Car, or Your Own Sandwich

Sant Martí Vell itself has zero restaurants. The workaround is to fold lunch into a short drive. Five minutes north, the roadside Venta de la Masía grills mountain paella (rabbit, pork rib, beans—no fish) over vine cuttings; weekends only, cash only, arrive before 1.30 p.m. or the rice runs out. Ten minutes south-east, in the industrial estate outside Celrà, a warehouse butcher sells fuet sausages peppery enough to make your nose tingle—buy one, add a loaf from Girona’s Saturday market, and you have a picnic that costs less than a London pint.

If you’d rather be fed, build the day around medieval Madremanya (8 min drive) where restaurant La Plaça does a fixed-price weekday menu: coca de recapte (roasted aubergine and red pepper on flaky flatbread), followed by slow-cooked veal cheek and a glass of young Empordà white—all for €16. Book; Madremanya is no secret among Barcelona weekenders.

When to Come, When to Leave

April–mid-June is ideal: poppies smear the wheat fields red, temperatures hover in the low 20s, and the light is soft enough for photography straight out of the gate. September repeats the trick, minus the spring mud. July and August are hot—34 °C by noon—and the lanes fall silent under a white sun; locals work dawn shifts then disappear indoors. Winter is misty, beautiful and closed. The church is locked, the vending machine is empty, and the only sound is your own footsteps echoing off stone. Come then only if you enjoy the sensation of trespassing politely.

The single festival worth planning around is the Festa Major, second weekend of November. Saturday night sardana dancing in the square, Sunday morning castellers (human towers) so small they look almost apologetic, and a communal lunch of escudella stew served from galvanized bins. Visitors are welcome but not announced; turn up with an appetite and a willingness to stand in the rain if the sky decides.

Tying It Together

Base yourself in Girona’s old town the night before—Hotel Bellavista is a converted manor with parking, doubles from £90. Leave the city by 9.30 a.m., reach Sant Martí Vell before the church shuts. Spend two unhurried hours, then loop south to Madremanya for lunch. Afterwards, burn off the calories at the Santuari dels Àngels, a hilltop chapel where Salvador Dalí married Gala; the road corkscrews upwards, delivering a 30-kilometre panorama that stretches from the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean glitter. Back at Girona airport in time for the evening Stansted flight, you will have travelled barely 40 kilometres yet felt the dial shift several centuries.

Sant Martí Vell doesn’t sell itself because it doesn’t need to. It is simply there, a place that has refused to become anywhere else. Arrive expecting to be entertained and you’ll leave hungry. Arrive prepared to slow down until the village heartbeat matches your own and you might find, when the engine restarts, that the rest of the world feels a notch too fast.