Serinyà

The first thing you notice is the smell of wet straw drifting from a barn half the size of a parish church. A tractor idles outside, its driver scrolling through WhatsApp while the engine ticks over. Nobody hurries. Serinyà, stretched along a low ridge at 188 m above the Pla de l’Estany plain, has spent 200,000 years watching visitors come and go; another few minutes won’t matter.

Stone-age neighbours

Most people arrive for the Coves de Serinyà, a string of limestone shelters where Neanderthal hearths lie a ten-minute stroll from the modern village bakery. The Prehistoric Cave Park is the only attraction that demands a timetable: tours leave on the hour, English-language slots are capped at fifteen people, and by 10 a.m. the coach bays fill with school groups from Girona. Book the night before (€9 adults, €5 children) and turn up five minutes early or you’ll be waved away until the next round. Inside, the guide switches between Catalan and careful English, pointing out tooth-sized flint scrapers and the layer of ash that once kept Ice-age nights at bay. The path is level but the ceiling dips; anyone over six foot spends half the visit stooped.

Above ground the interpretation centre does a brisk job of putting bones in context. A five-minute video shows mammoths wandering across what is now a car-park, then dissolves into present-day fields of barley. After twenty minutes you’ve seen the lot, which is either refreshing or disappointing, depending on how many National Trust properties have numbed your attention span.

Pedals, footpaths and the Banyoles bounce

Serinyà works best as a base rather than a checklist. Flat farm lanes radiate east towards Lake Banyoles (6 km) and west to the wooded crater of Sant Miquel de Campmajor. Bring a bike or rent one by the lake—gears are optional, the gradient rarely rises above a motorway bridge. The GR-1 long-distance footpath skirts the village; northbound it hugs the drystone walls of isolated masías, southbound it drops towards Crespià where a single-bar café serves lukewarm Estrella at pavement tables. Maps.me covers the tracks, but signposts vanish at junctions. If the wheat looks taller than your handlebars, you’ve gone wrong.

Early mornings smell of dew and diesel as farmers fire up cultivators. By eleven the sun is high enough to send English shoulders lobster-red; siesta hour starts at two and the roads fall silent apart from the hum of a distant muck-spreader. Mid-July temperatures brush 34 °C, yet the altitude knocks the edge off the humidity—more bearable than the Costa Brava ovens down the road. Winter reverses the deal: mornings hover at 4 °C, mist pools in the hollows, and the caves close on Mondays. Bring a fleece and expect closed doors.

Bread, bacon and the sheep-next-door dessert

The village itself is a scatter of ochre plaster and corrugated sheds. There is no postcard square, no ivy-draped arch. What you get instead is function: a bakery that sells still-warm coca (Catalan flatbread) topped with roasted aubergine, a butcher who will cut jamón slices while you wait, and Cal Foll, a bar where pensioners debate tractor parts over omelette baguettes. If the till stops working the owner writes your bill on a beer mat—honesty boxes without the box.

For a sit-down meal you drive five kilometres to Banyoles. Can Xabanet keeps an English menu beside the till and serves T-bones the size of a Size-9 boot, handy when children mutiny against squid. Back in Serinyà the local speciality is recuit, a delicate sheep-milk curd that tastes like distant Greek yoghurt. Drizzle with honey, add a glass of chilled garnatxa blanca, and you have pudding for under €4.

Stock up before 2 p.m.; the only grocery shutters at lunch and doesn’t reopen until five, assuming the owner returns from her sister’s on time. Sunday is retail wilderness—fill the boot in Banyoles or survive on crisps.

Fireworks, fiestas and the September sleep thief

The main festival lands around 3 August in honour of Sant Esteve. A foam machine transforms the football pitch into a kiddie disco, the brass band plays until two, and elderly couples dance sardanas with the concentration of chess masters. Foreign visitors are welcome but invisible; no tourist office, no bilingual banners, just a village getting on with its party.

September brings the correfoc, a more anarchic affair. Devils in red long-johns spin firecrackers above their heads and process through the narrow high street while British families peer from balconies of rented stone houses. Earplugs recommended if you turn in before midnight; the racket ricochets off the walls until the final rocket fizzles out in the maize fields.

Getting there, getting in, getting groceries

Serinyà has no station. The fastest route is fly to Girona, pick up a hire car, and head north-west for 25 minutes on the C-66. Buses exist but run on academic timetables—one mid-morning, one late afternoon, none on Sunday. A taxi from Girona airport costs about €55; split between four it’s cheaper than the Gatwick Express.

Parking is free and usually empty except beside the cave entrance where coaches clog the turning circle between 10:30 and 12:30. Entry to the village itself is free; you pay only for the guided cave tour and the honesty jar beside the bakery’s sugared doughnuts.

Accommodation splits into two camps: stone farmhouses with pools (Mas Cufí, Can Torrent) booked by extended families who want space and shade, and smaller apartments above the bakery that let you roll out for coffee at eight without driving. Prices swing from €90 a night for a two-bedroom flat in May to €220 for a six-bed masia in August. Book early for late July; the school-party calendar fills rural beds faster than stag weekends fill Barcelona.

When to cut your losses

Come in spring if you want green wheat and resident storks, or in late September when the stubble turns gold and the first fireworks haven’t yet scared the dog. Avoid mid-August if you hate crowds; the village trebles in noise even if head-count stays modest. Winter is honest—empty lanes, shuttered caves on Mondays, woodsmoke in the air—but you will need the car for every coffee.

Leave the Costa checklist at home. Serinyà offers time, not icons. If that sounds thin, stay on the beach. If it sounds like breathing space, park under the plane trees, buy a coca still hot from the oven, and remember that 200,000 years ago someone else stood here, looked across the same plain, and decided it was worth coming back tomorrow.