Sobremunt

The church bell strikes twice and the only other sound is a tractor in the fold of valley 300 metres below. Sobremunt sits at 880 m on a lip of schist and oak, 22 km north of Vic, and from its single bench you look south across a wrinkled carpet of forest that hides half-empty farmhouses and the occasional flash of the Cardener river. On a crisp March morning the snowline on the Pyrenean wall feels close enough to touch; by July the same peaks shimmer like a heat haze mirage and the village smells of cut hay and warm pine.

This is not a place that announces itself. The road up from Sant Bartomeu del Grau twists for 11 km, gaining 500 m through beech woods where wild boar dig up the verges at night. Tarmac thins to a single track, stone walls press in, and suddenly the houses appear – twenty-odd, built shoulder-to-shoulder against the wind. Most are still lived in, their shutters painted the same ox-blood red used two centuries ago when the village made its living from sheep, not strangers.

Stone, slope and silence

Architecture here is a conversation between gravity and winter. Walls are a metre thick, roofs steep enough to shed snow, and every doorway faces east to catch the first weak sun after a December fog. The parish church of Sant Miquel – locked except for Sunday mass – has a bell-cast roof patched with tin and a tiny Romanesque window that throws a lemon-shaped light onto bare plaster. There is no ticket office, no audio guide, just a handwritten notice asking visitors to close the gate so the sheep don’t wander in.

Walk fifty paces past the church and the village ends; the tarmac becomes a gravel track that forks toward three working masias. One belongs to the Soldevila family, who still make cheese from their own cows and will sell you a 1 kg wheel of tupí for €12 if you knock before 9 a.m. They speak Catalan fast and with a burr; money changes hands on the doorstep and the cheese arrives wrapped in yesterday’s Diari de Vic.

Paths that remember sheep

Sobremunt is stitched together by medieval drove roads – carrils – that once funnelled flocks to winter pastures on the coast. Today they make perfect walking: wide enough for two mules, paved in places, and signed only by the occasional cairn. The easiest loop heads north-east along the GR-3 for 4 km to the ruined chapel of Santa Margarida, where swallows nest in the altar and someone has left a plastic tub of rain-water for dogs. The climb is gentle, the descent ruthless; knees will notice the gradient on the way back.

For something stiffer, continue another 6 km to the ridge at Coll de Jou. Here the view opens north across the Ripollès – a chessboard of meadows and dark fir – and on a clear day you can pick out the microwave mast on top of Puigmal, 45 km away. Take a windproof; the same breeze that lifts red kites over the valley can knife through a fleece in May.

Seasons swing hard

Spring comes late. Snow can fall as far south as Vic in April, and Sobremunt’s farmers wait until early May to plant potatoes. By June the hillside is loud with nightingales and the air smells of box hedge and wet earth. July and August are hot but rarely stifling; nights cool to 14 °C so cottages still have fireplaces lit. Autumn is the photographers’ window: mornings start in fog, by 10 a.m. thermals lift the cloud and whole slopes glow like a Turner study in gamboge and rust.

Winter is underrated. Daytime hovers around 6 °C, skies are enamel-blue and the GR-3 turns into a firm ribbon perfect for micro-spikes. The village fountain freezes into a chandelier of icicles; locals skate stones across the cattle trough and call it curling català. Access is rarely a problem – the Vic council grits as far as the last farm – but carry snow chains if snow is forecast above 900 m.

Where to eat and sleep

Sobremunt itself has no hotel, no bar, no shop. The nearest bed is 7 km down the hill at Cal Serni, a stone farmhouse turned guesthouse with four rooms, communal dinners and a honesty shelf of local wine. Dinners are three courses, served at a single long table: think escudella thick enough to stand a spoon in, followed by rabbit with prunes and a thimble of ratafia liquor. Double rooms from €80, half-board €35 extra; book by WhatsApp because the mobile signal dies every time it rains.

Day-trippers usually eat in Vic before or after. Can Pamplona on Plaça del Carbó does a weekday menú del dia for €14: bread, wine, salad and a cast-iron pan of fricandó (beef and wild-mushroom stew) that could silence a Yorkshire appetite. If you want something lighter, La Taula offers modern tapas – confit cod with chickpea foam – but keep an eye on the clock; kitchens shut at 4 p.m. sharp and waiters will not be charmed into reopening.

What to bring, what to leave

Mobile coverage is patchy; download offline maps. A 1:25,000 Editorial Alpina sheet covers the whole ridge and weighs less than a phone battery. Water is drinkable from every public tap, but there are only two south of the village so carry a litre. Dogs are welcome, sheep are nervous; keep them on leads during May and June when lambs are in the fields. Finally, silence is part of the currency here – if you must take a call, stand on the bench; stone walls amplify every syllable.

Leave the drone at home. The Soldevila brothers have shot two down with bird-scarers and will bill you €200 for disturbing the herd.

Last light

By six the sun slips behind Turó del Sui and the temperature drops like a stone. Headlights start their slow descent toward Vic, but most evenings at least one car stops, window down, driver asking “És aquí Sobremunt?” The answer is the same: “Sí, però no hi ha res.” Yes, but there is nothing here – nothing except space, stone and the smell of cows drifting up from the milking shed. For some that is precisely the point. Arrive expecting entertainment and you will leave hungry; arrive with a waterproof and an empty afternoon and the village will give you back a slice of altitude and quiet that the Costa Brava lost sometime around 1992. Just remember to shut the gate on the way out.