Camós

The First Clue You’re Here

The sat-nav gives up 200 metres before the village sign. That’s normal. Mobile bars vanish, the road narrows to a single stripe of tarmac between dry-stone walls, and a goat watches from a gateway as if it’s on neighbourhood watch. Camós sits 168 metres above sea-level on a ridge that divides the lake basin of Banyoles from the grain fields of Pla de l’Estany. From the windscreen you glimpse the Pyrenees one way, the shimmer of the lake the other, and nothing much in between except olive terraces and the occasional tractor that refuses to reverse.

Stone, Silence and the Occasional Bell

Park where the lane widens by the church—there are no yellow lines because nobody needs them. Sant Esteve’s bell strikes the hour even when nobody’s listening; the sound ricochets off façades of honey-coloured granite that have absorbed five centuries of afternoon heat. No gift shop sells fridge magnets. Instead, you’ll find a single bar whose door stands open from seven in the morning until the owner, Carme, decides the conversation has run dry. Order a cafè amb llet and she’ll push across a saucer of home-baked pastissets, anise-scented biscuits that taste of Easter even in October.

The village folds in on itself like a closed book. Streets are barely a car-width wide; walkers flatten themselves against doorways to let the bread van pass. Peer through iron grilles and you’ll see pocket-sized courtyards where geraniums survive on rainwater funnelled from gutters. A stone shield above one doorway shows the date 1634 and a boar’s head—evidence that somebody made money here once, then chose to stay quiet about it.

What You Do When There’s Nothing to Do

Camós doesn’t do attractions. It does rhythms. Mid-morning, old men in berets shuffle to the bakery for the second batch of pa de pagès, round country loaves crusty enough to loosen fillings. By noon the smell of grilled botifarra drifts from back-yard barbecues; someone is always burning vine cuttings, the smoke sweet and sharp like English apple wood. Afternoons are for siesta or for following the signed farm track that loops three kilometres through wheat and sunflowers to the hamlet of Mata. There, a stone trough still runs with spring water; fill your bottle and turn back, or keep walking until Banyoles lake appears as a sudden blue plate between hills.

Cyclists use the lanes for interval training: the ridge road climbs 120 metres in 2 km, enough to make thighs burn, then drops to the lake flats where professional teams circle the 7-km track before lunch. You can hire a bike in Banyoles for €18 a day; bring your own helmet because Spanish hire shops still think safety is optional.

Eating Without Showcasing

Evenings start late. The village’s only restaurant, Can Xelo, opens at nine and stops taking orders when the daily haul of ingredients runs out. Trinxat—mashed potato and cabbage pressed into a cake with pancetta crackling—arrives in a cast-iron skillet big enough for two. Follow it with lake perch sautéed in almond butter, a dish that tastes of place more than ambition. House wine is decanted from an unlabelled bottle and costs €2.50 a glass; it’s a Carignan that would retail in Manchester for £14 if it had a designer label.

If you’re self-catering, shop before you leave Girona. The village grocer unlocks on Tuesday and Friday mornings, stocks tinned tuna, tinned tomatoes and not much else. Fresh produce means driving eight minutes to Banyoles market: white asparagus thicker than a marker pen, goats’ cheese still wearing ash from the maturing cave, and strawberries that actually smell of strawberries because they haven’t seen a chiller lorry.

When the Weather Becomes a Character

Spring brings waist-high grass poppies and the risk of a tramuntana wind that can flick a hat into France. Summer nights hover around 24 °C; stone houses act like storage heaters, so budget for a bedroom fan or choose a place with a pool—there are half-a-dozen holiday lets with plunge pools no larger than a Bedford van but cold enough to survive August. Autumn smells of new wine and burnt stubble; morning mist pools in the valley so the lake looks like a sheet of hammered pewter. Winter is short but sharp: daytime 12 °C, nights 2 °C, and the church bell tower can vanish inside cloud for days. Snow is rare; when it arrives the village WhatsApp group explodes with photos taken before the melt starts at ten o’clock.

Getting Stuck, Getting Out

You need wheels. No bus climbs the hill, and the nearest taxi rank is in Banyoles where drivers treat Camós like a foreign country. Girona airport is 35 minutes south on the C-66; hire cars live in the multi-storey opposite arrivals. Fill the tank before you leave—rural petrol stations close at noon on Saturday and don’t reopen until Monday. If you fly into Barcelona, allow an extra hour on the AP-7 toll road; budget €18 each way in motorway fees, more if you miss the junction and hit the Peaje del Papiol, Spain’s most expensive 12 km.

August traffic can turn the lake road into a tail-back of Dutch caravans. Escape early, before ten, or after siesta when the heat has emptied the beach car parks. Conversely, January feels semi-abandoned; some restaurants shut the entire month and the bakery reduces output to a single batch. Easter week, on the other hand, brings Catalan families who book the same cottage every year and speak of Camós as though it’s a family member who mustn’t change.

The Upshot

Camós will not change your life. It offers no Instagram spike, no bucket-list tick. What it does offer is a place where the loudest noise at midnight is the church clock, where the baker remembers how you like your coffee after two visits, and where you can walk out of the front door straight into barley fields that rustle like applause when the wind changes. Come if you need a reset, a base for lake swims and volcano hikes, or simply a village that refuses to perform for tourists. Bring a paperback, a phrase-book and a car small enough to fit between walls built when mules were the width standard. Leave before you start complaining about the Wi-Fi; stay longer and you’ll stop noticing it’s gone.