Anglès

The 07:15 bus from Girona drops you opposite a brick textile mill that still hums with machinery. Welcome to Anglès, a town of 5,000 that never bothered to audition for the role of “quaint Spanish village”. Instead it kept its factory whistle, its riverbank allotments and its weekly market where the loudest noise is a crate of lettuces hitting the pavement.

Angles sits 181 metres above sea-level at the point where the Montseny hills decide they’ve had enough drama and flatten into the Selva plain. The Ter river does a slow loop around the western edge, providing both the town’s drinking water and its Saturday swimming holes. You won’t find the Costa Brava here – the Med is 35 minutes away by car – but you will find locals who greet the baker by name and bars that still charge €1.20 for a cortado.

Morning starts early. By eight the pavement tables of Cafè de la Plaça are taken by men in work boots reading El Punt Avui and arguing about last night’s Barça score. Order a cafè amb llet and you’ll get it in a glass heavy enough to double as a weapon; the accompanying croissant is defiantly non-buttery, the way Catalans prefer it. If you need something sturdier, walk two streets north to Forn Pa i Xocolat where the same family has fired the bread oven since 1953. Their pa de pagès has a crust that could chip teeth – tear it open and the crumb steams like a geothermal vent.

Stone, water and the smell of dye

The old centre is a rectangle of lanes barely two donkeys wide. Houses grow straight from the river rock, their ground floors once workshops for looms that turned local wool into blankets sold as far away as Cuba. Look up and you’ll spot stone corbels carved with shears or spindles, the medieval equivalent of a company logo. Number 12 on Carrer Major still has a wooden hatch where cloth was handed out to piece-workers; knock and the current owner, an elderly woman named Montse, will show you the soot-blackened beam where tally marks were cut every Friday.

At the bottom of the hill the twelfth-century bridge, Pont Vell, carries only foot traffic now. Its central arch was rebuilt after the 1940 flood when the Ter woke up, swallowed the vegetable gardens and deposited a Fiat 500 in the church porch. Stand in the middle at dusk and you’ll see bats flicker under the stonework while swallows practise low-level aerobatics overhead. Downstream, teenagers launch themselves from a concrete platform into a natural pool deep enough to hide the supermarket trolleys. Water temperature hovers around 20 °C in July – bracing, but then so is the local temperament.

The parish church of Santa Maria squats above the river like a referee who has seen too many fouls. The Romanesque portal survives, but the rest was baroque-ed into submission in 1789 after lightning torched the roof. Inside, the smell is beeswax and damp stone, overlaid on Sundays by the faint sweetness of moscatell communion wine. Climb the narrow stair to the bell tower (door normally open after Mass) and you can scan the town’s layout: red terracotta to the east, green allotments to the west, and the white stripe of the textile chimney still releasing steam into the Catalan sky.

Pedal, paddle or simply sit

Angles works best as a base rather than a checklist. A 25-km greenway, the Ruta del Ter, starts beside the mill and follows the river north through poplars and abandoned rice fields. Hire a bike at Rebicicletes (€18 a day; they’ll lend you a helmet that looks like it survived the Civil War) and you can freewheel as far as Girona without meeting a single lorry. Birders should bring binoculars: night herons roost under the railway bridge and the flash of a kingfisher is common enough to become a drinking-game prompt.

If you prefer walking, head south along the camí de Brunyola. The path climbs gently through holm-oak and farmed terraces until, after 45 minutes, the sea appears as a silver shard between two ridges. Turn round when the trail starts demanding proper boots – the bar at Can Xapes serves a three-course menú del dia for €14 that includes wine and a slice of crema catalana thick enough to spackle walls.

Should the mercury nudge 35 °C, follow the locals to Gorg de la Plana, a ten-minute stroll past the cemetery. Granite slabs create natural jacuzzis; bring a cheap inflatable and you can drift while watching dragonflies helicopter overhead. No lifeguard, no entry fee, no ice-cream van – just the occasional goat peering down from the opposite bank.

Calories and caffeine

Eating options are limited but honest. L’Alianca occupies a former textile warehouse with beams blackened by a century of soot. Weekend lunch starts with pa amb tomàquet and ends with crema catalana; in between you might get rabbit stewed in allioli or trout that was swimming that morning. They’ll happily swap chips for salad if your offspring stage a revolt. For something quicker, Bar Ter does a bocadillo of butifarra (Catalan pork sausage) that costs €3.50 and arrives cut in half, because sharing is assumed.

Coffee culture is taken seriously. Cafè de la Plaça uses beans roasted 20 km away in Banyoles; ask for a cafè llarg (long, but not as wishy-washy as an Americano) and you’ll get a cup that keeps its crema to the final sip. Pair it with a xuixo, a deep-fried pastry oozing crema patissera – the local claim to calorific fame. Legend says it was named after the bandit who invented it, the sugar rush intended to help him flee faster.

Evenings revolve around the passeig, the pedestrianised strip between the church and the river. Grandparents occupy the metal benches, toddlers career on scooters and teenagers compare Instagram stories. Order a vermut rojo at Bar Nou and you’ll be served a chilled glass with a sardine-stuffed olive balanced on the rim – the Catalan equivalent of a beer umbrella.

When the town turns the volume up

Visit during the last week of August and you’ll witness the Festa Major, three days when sleep becomes theoretical. Brass bands parade at midnight, correfocs (devil-runners) hurl sparks down Carrer Major and the square fills with couples dancing sardanas to a live cobla band. Accommodation doubles in price and the bakery opens all night – stock up on coca de sucre, a flatbread topped with anise and mountains of sugar, the preferred stamina food.

January brings Sant Antoni, a quieter but equally telling affair. Horses, donkeys and the occasional bemused labrador queue outside the church for blessing; their owners share vi ranci, a fortified wine that tastes like liquid Christmas pudding. If you’re travelling with a pet, bring it – the priest sprinkles anything on four legs, and the spectacle is worth the early start.

Winter itself is underrated. Daytime temperatures sit around 12 °C, ideal for hiking without the sweat shower. Mist pools in the river valley at dawn, turning the town into a Turner painting minus the shipwreck. Hotels drop prices, bars light the xemeneia (open fire) and the smell of grilled calçots (giant spring onions) drifts from garden barbecues. Bring a fleece; nights drop to 3 °C and central heating is not a given in budget hostals.

Getting here, getting out

Angles has no train station. From Girona bus station take the SARFA service marked “Osor-Angles”; there are six a day, fewer on Sunday, and the timetable is more aspirational than binding (€2.85, 25 min). A taxi costs €25 and drivers will phone your accommodation to check someone’s in – useful if you’ve booked one of the two family-run hostals. Hire cars should be collected at Girona airport; the AP-7 exit 8 is ten minutes away, but sat-nav likes to send you down a farm track – ignore anything narrower than a UK B-road.

Leaving is easy. The 18:15 bus connects with the 19:05 fast train to Barcelona, putting you in Catalunya station by 20:00. That’s the practical bit. The harder part is walking away from a town whose rhythm is dictated by river flow rather than Wi-Fi speed. Anglès won’t change your life, but it might recalibrate your watch – and these days that counts as a return ticket.