El Poal

The irrigation water arrives at six o'clock sharp. You can set your watch by the rush that fills the concrete channel behind Carrer Major, turning dusty earth into dark chocolate soil in minutes. It's this daily pulse—more reliable than any bus timetable—that keeps El Poal's 655 souls tethered to an agricultural rhythm most of Britain forgot three generations ago.

Flat Land, Sharp Light

Stand in the plaça at 216 metres above sea level and the horizon stretches like a taut wire. No hills break the view, only the geometric lines of peach orchards and cereal plots that run right up to the village edge. The Montsec mountains sit thirty kilometres north, a faint cardboard cut-out against the sky, but here everything happens on one plane. That flatness creates cinematographic light: at dawn the fields glow amber, by midday the soil resembles cracked biscuit, and come evening the irrigation canals turn into strips of polished steel.

This is the Pla d'Urgell, Catalonia's answer to East Anglia, only sunnier and with better bread. Farmers work the same holdings their great-grandfathers received when the Canal d'Urgell first brought water in 1861, transforming scrub into Lleida province's most productive horticultural belt. The village itself measures barely a kilometre square; you can walk every street in twenty minutes, nodding to the same pensioners who'll be in the same bar twenty-four hours later.

What Passes for Sights

Don't expect a medieval core. El Poal grew piecemeal around its church, a modest 18th-century affair whose bell tower doubles as the mobile-phone mast. The stone façade needs a scrub, but step inside during Saturday evening mass and you'll catch the real monument: twenty-odd voices singing in Catalan, the sound bouncing off bare walls like birds trapped in a barn. Otherwise the building stays locked; the priest cycles in from neighbouring Bellvís.

Architecture buffs might clock the forged-iron balconies on Carrer de l'Església, replicas installed when the street was repaved in 2004. Everyone else gravitates towards the canal path at the eastern edge, where cyclamen push through cracked tarmac and dragonflies hover above the water. Follow it south for ten minutes and you reach an old lock keeper's hut, now converted into a bird hide used by visiting Germans with lenses the length of your arm. They come for purple herons in April, hoopoes in May, and the occasional osprey that overshoots the Ebro delta.

Pedal Power and Peach Brandy

Flat terrain means cycling requires zero fitness yet delivers maximum countryside. Borrow a bike from your accommodation (most have two leaning against a barn wall) and head north on the camí de les Coves. Within five minutes tarmac gives way to compacted earth that smells of fennel after rain. Peach trees form a pink-and-white corridor in March; by July the overhanging branches drop fruit onto the track, warm as bath water. Twenty minutes brings you to Vila-sana's restaurant Cal Pinxo, where a three-course lunch menu costs €14 and the house wine arrives in a jug with no label but plenty of legs.

Serious riders can loop the 42-kilometre Circuit del Pla, passing six villages and two irrigation museums. Wind is your only enemy; set off early to avoid the afternoon breeze that barrels across the plain like a runaway lorry. Summer temperatures hit 38 °C by noon—enough to melt the tar—so carry two litres of water and start at sunrise, when dew still clings to spider webs and the only sound is the hiss of your tyres.

Eating, or Why You'll Return Five Kilos Heavier

Food here bypasses fashion. Locals judge a restaurant by the quality of its olive oil and the crunch of its pa amb tomàquet, nothing more. Thursday is snail day: women queue at the Carnisseria Jaume for live cargols, destined for a tomato-and-herb stew that tastes faintly of woodland after rain. If the thought makes you queasy, order the rabbit instead—shot in nearby alfalfa fields and served with dried figs that collapse into the sauce.

Evening options within the village limits themselves amount to two bars and a bakery that stays open until the bread runs out. Bar Poal does decent tapas: try the coca de recapte, a rectangular flatbread topped with roasted aubergine and red pepper, cut with scissors at your table. For anything more ambitious, drive five kilometres to Mollerussa, where Cal Ton offers Segrià lamb roasted in a wood-fired oven whose temperature gauge broke sometime in 1997. The meat arrives pink, scented with thyme and garlic, accompanied by a bowl of chickpeas that have absorbed the dripping. A meal for two with wine costs about €35—roughly what you'd pay for a single main in Barcelona's Gothic Quarter.

When the Village Throws Off Its Slippers

August turns everything sideways. The Festa Major packs three days of concerts, tractor parades and all-night dancing into streets that barely accommodate a Citroën. British visitors often book apartments overlooking the plaça for the atmosphere, then discover Spanish brass bands rehearse at 01:00 and the baker starts his scooter at 04:30. Earplugs essential. The high point—literally—is the castell workshop on Sunday morning, when children as young as six practise building human towers on a patch of grass no bigger than a tennis court. Fall, and the soft landing is provided by two blokes with a stretched tarpaulin and reflexes like test-match slips.

Winter reverts to library silence. Mist pools in the canals, and the smell of wood smoke drifts from chimneys. Temperatures drop to -3 °C at night; stone houses lack central heating, so landlords supplement with portable gas heaters that guzzle €19 bottles every three days. Pack slippers and negotiate the fuel bill upfront. On the plus side, you get sharp blue skies, empty roads, and the annual matança del porc, when families slaughter a pig and spend two days turning it into sausages, black pudding and jars of preserved fat that last until Easter.

Getting There, Staying Sane

High-speed trains dash from Barcelona Sants to Lleida in 59 minutes; after that you're on your own. A twice-daily bus covers the final 25 kilometres, but timetables assume you have a PhD in Byzantine theology. Hire a car at Lleida instead—€28 a day with Goldcar if you pre-book—and reach El Poal in 25 minutes via the A-14. Petrol costs about €1.45 a litre, cheaper than Britain but still painful if you plan daily excursions.

Accommodation runs to three Airbnb farm conversions and one proper B&B. The barns look Instagram-ready—exposed beams, stone sinks, Moroccan tiles—but check whether the owner lives next door; thin walls transmit every word of the dawn radio bulletin. Prices hover around €85 per night year-round, though owners often accept four-night midweek stays for the cost of three if you ask in Spanish. Cash still rules: the village has neither bank nor cashpoint; the nearest is a five-minute drive to Mollerussa, where the Santander machine charges €2 per withdrawal.

Mobile signal flickers between 4G and the sort of 3G last seen in rural Norfolk circa 2010. Download offline maps, then surrender to the pleasure of being unreachable. By the second evening you'll find yourself counting irrigation channels instead of emails, and wondering whether Britain's obsession with hills might be slightly overrated.