Sant Agustí de Lluçanès

The tractors outnumber the cars on the single road that threads through Sant Agustí de Lluçanès. At 850 m above sea-level the air is thin enough to make the diesel clatter carry further, so when the farmer pulls over to let a hire-car pass, the whole village hears the courtesy. There are no traffic lights, no cash machine, and—crucially—no mobile coverage in the stone-built bar. If you need directions, you ask the man mending a fence; if he doesn’t know you, he’ll still walk you to the turning.

This is the Lluçanès plateau, a bruised-up lip of land between Barcelona and the Pyrenees that most maps forget to name. Sant Agustí sits at its highest point, a scatter of thirty-odd houses and a Romanesque church whose bell still marks the quarter-hour for fields of beans and fodder maize. The nearest supermarket is 17 km away in Prats de Lluçanès; the nearest police station, 25. What the village does have is hay—rolls of it parked like modern sculpture on every verge—and a network of farm tracks that double as walking routes once the tractors clock off.

Stone, Sky and the Smell of Cut Grass

The church of Sant Agustí looks shut until you lean on the door. Inside, the temperature drops five degrees and the perfume changes from warm grass to candle smoke and damp stone. The building is 12th-century at its core, but the walls have been patched so often the mortar forms a geological map of local hardship: slate from nearby Olost, brick from a 19th-century kiln, concrete from the 1970s when someone decided the tower might fall. No guidebook sells you the story; instead, a laminated A4 sheet hangs from a nail, explaining—in Catalan only—why the altar faces east. Read it or don’t. The swallows nesting above the rafters have already decided the place is theirs.

Outside, the view opens north towards the Pyrenees. On a clear morning you can pick out the silhouette of Puigmal, 60 km away, while directly below, the land folds into a chessboard of smallholdings. Many are still worked by families whose surnames appear on stones in the adjacent cemetery. Dry-stone walls divide pasture from wheat, and every third field contains a masia, the classic Catalan farmhouse with a gateway wide enough for a cart and hay-loft windows shaped like half-closed eyes. Some masies are weekend retreats for Barcelona lawyers; others house three generations and a pack of dogs that bark at anything slower than a cloud.

Walking Without Waymarks

Officially, the county council has printed a brochure entitled “10 Routes around Sant Agustí”. Unofficially, the routes are the same dirt tracks farmers have used since the Middle Ages, and waymarks appear only when someone has nailed up a scrap of yellow paint that hasn’t yet weathered off. The walking is gentle but not trivial: gradients hover around 8–12 %, and the altitude can make a 10 km loop feel longer. The reward is solitude. On an April weekday you might meet one retired couple from Terrassa and a man on a quad bike checking sheep. That’s the crowd.

Two walks deserve the boot leather. The first climbs 45 minutes to the Puig de la Creu (1 051 m), a bald summit with a waist-high iron cross. From here the plain drops away like an upturned bowl and you can trace the road you arrived on as it snakes through Prats and disappears towards Vic. The second route heads south-east along the GR-3 long-distance path to the village of Lluçà, 5 km distant. Halfway, the track passes the Romanesque chapel of Santa Creu de Lluçà, unlocked, empty, and with a guestbook that records more hedgehogs than humans. Take water: there are no cafés, no fountains, and shade arrives only when the sun hits the mountains after four o’clock.

Summer hikers should start early. By midday the thermometer can touch 32 °C and the track dust rises like flour. In October the plateau turns ochre and the temperature drops to 14 °C; this is the locals’ favourite season, when mushrooms push through the oak leaf litter and the air smells of damp earth and woodsmoke. Winter brings snow perhaps twice a year, enough to make the road from Prats impassable for half a day. If you’re renting, book a car with winter tyres; the village grit bin is communal and nobody shovels your stretch for you.

Beans, Bread and the Friday Truck

There is no restaurant in Sant Agustí. The social centre opens on Saturday nights for drinks, but the kitchen closes at nine unless the volunteer cook’s granddaughter has a football match. Plan instead to self-cater. Every Friday a white van labelled “Pa i Llet” toots around the lanes at 10 a.m. selling milk in plastic two-litre bottles, eggs still freckled with feather, and cocas—flatbreads topped with roasted peppers—wrapped in brown paper. Beans are the local boast: giant white fesols del ganxet, grown in the valley below and sold by the kilo from a fridge in the porch of Cal Gassó farm. A half-kilo bag costs €4; soak them overnight and they collapse into a stew the colour of parchment.

If you want someone else to do the boiling, drive 12 km to the restaurant Can Pere in Olost. Weekday lunch is a three-course menú del dia for €16, including wine that arrives in a glass bottle with no label and tastes better than it should. Expect grilled rabbit, a bowl of those same beans with butifarra sausage, and crema catalana thick enough to hold a spoon upright. The dining room fills with farmers still wearing their barn boots; nobody removes them.

Where to Lay Your Head

Accommodation is limited to three restored masies that operate as rural guesthouses. Closest to the village centre is Cal Ferrer, a 17th-century stone house with four bedrooms, underfloor heating powered by a pellet boiler, and a honesty fridge stocked with local beer. Doubles run €90–110 depending on season, including breakfast of fresh cheese, tomato-rubbed bread and honey from hives you can see in the garden. They’ll lend you a map hand-drawn by the owner’s teenage son; it is more accurate than the official one.

Cheaper, and half a kilometre outside the village perimeter, Ca l’Eva offers two studio apartments at €65 a night with kitchenettes strong enough to simmer beans. Mobile coverage flickers in and out; the Wi-Fi is reliable because the host teaches online university classes and has invested in fibre. Check the calendar before booking: when the village fiesta erupts on the last weekend of August, every room is booked by second cousins and the price doubles.

The Quiet End of the Road

By ten o’clock the village is dark enough to read star charts. The only illumination comes from the church porch and the orange glow of TV sets leaking through kitchen shutters. Walk to the edge of the settlement and the silence is so complete you can separate the sound of your heartbeat from the thud of your boots. Somewhere downhill a dog barks once, then thinks better of it.

Sant Agustí will never mint a postcard bestseller. It offers no souvenir shop, no cocktail bar, no viewpoint selfie queue. What it does give, generously, is the chance to calibrate your watch to a slower gear: the speed at which a cloud drifts across a bean field, or the interval between bell rings that measures the afternoon. Arrive expecting rustic charm and you’ll leave hungry. Arrive with a pair of walking boots, a paperback in Catalan you can’t read, and enough cash for beans, and you might stay longer than the road intended.