Riells i Viabrea

Two bells, one parish, zero fuss

At 9.30 on a Tuesday the baker in Riells is already stacking coques—flat breads scattered with sugar or sobrassada—while across the main road in Viabrea the bar owner is hosing last night’s dust off the pavement. Same council, two centres, ten minutes on foot apart. That split personality is the first thing a visitor notices: two churches (Sant Martí and Sant Feliu), two feast days, two slightly different accents of Catalan. It feels less like a single village than a pair of siblings who never bothered to move out.

The place sits 96 m above sea level on the southern lip of the Montseny massif, close enough to the Costa Brava to smell pine on the breeze but far enough inland to escape the August coastal crush. Locals who work in Girona or Barcelona treat it as a dormitory; travellers use it as a cheap, low-noise base for day trips to the coast, the mountains or the medieval towns that dot the Selva comarca. Expect small-scale, not story-book.

Morning routines and market maths

Market day rewires the traffic flow. On Wednesday and Saturday the plaça de Riells fills with perhaps twenty stalls: olives the colour of old pewter, romesco sauce sold in re-used beer bottles, honey from beekeepers who’ll name the exact hillside their hives sat on. Prices feel stuck in the last decade—€3 buys a paper tray of empanades big enough for lunch. Parking is painless if you arrive before ten; after that you’ll circle the sports pitch with every other latecomer.

The rest of the week the shopping options shrink to two bakeries, a carnisseria that still wraps pork chops in brown paper, and a compact Spar that keeps British teabags on the bottom shelf for the handful of expat residents. ATMs live inside the bank on Carrer Major; both charge €2 per withdrawal and refuse to acknowledge most UK cards on the first try. Bring cash, or cultivate patience.

Forests you can walk to without a car

You don’t need to drive to find dirt under your boots. From the top of Viabrea a gravel track, signposted merely “riera”, follows a dry stream bed into holm-oak shade. Within fifteen minutes the only sounds are the buzz of cicadas and the click of trekking poles carried by elderly locals in impeccable pressed shirts. The gradient is gentle, the path wide enough for two abreast; pushchair-friendly until the first ford, where the stones turn bowling-ball slippery.

If you want altitude, the Montseny proper starts 8 km north. Drive to the Font Martina car park and you can be on the 1,706 m summit of Les Agudes in four hours, returning via the Pas del Llop ridge for views that stretch to the Pyrenees on a crisp December afternoon. Summer hikers should start early: by 11 a.m. the southern slopes radiate heat like storage heaters, and shade is scarce above the beeline.

Lunch that doesn’t start until the church strikes two

Guidebooks promise “mountain cuisine”; Riells delivers set menus written on a whiteboard. Monday to Friday most kitchens offer menú del dia for €14: three courses, wine, bread and the sort of coffee that makes you remember why café con leche used to feel exotic. Expect fricandó (beef stew thick with dried rossinyols mushrooms), bacallà a la llauna (salt cod baked with garlic and paprika) and, in season, fesols beans the size of pound coins. Vegetarians get escalivada—aubergine and peppers served room temperature—followed by mató cheese drizzled with local honey. It’s honest rather than flashy; nobody will Instagram the plating.

Evenings are quieter. Most kitchens close by nine; the few bars that stay open cluster around the Riells church steps. Order a canya (20 cl draught beer, about €2.40) and you’ll share the counter with firefighters from the adjacent station and teenagers arguing over whose turn it is on the dart machine. Live music appears sporadically, advertised on A4 sheets taped to lamp posts: usually a lone guitarist revisiting Catalan folk standards. Applause is polite, conversation resumes, everyone heads home before midnight.

Beds, budgets and the August question

Accommodation is thin on the ground. There are two small hostals—essentially pub-with-rooms—offering doubles for €55–€70 year-round. Both sit above bars that double as breakfast cafés; earplugs are advisable on Friday nights when wedding parties spill onto the street. A handful of rural cottages (casas rurales) orbit the outskirts, most booked by Catalan families repeating the same August fortnight they’ve taken since the 1990s. Availability opens up in late May and mid-September, when the weather is still beach-friendly but Spanish schools are in session and prices dip by a third.

August itself is a trade-off. The village swells with grandparents minding children while parents commute to city jobs. The pool (piscina municipal) becomes a social club; queues for the inflatable slide snake round the changing blocks. On the plus side, every evening brings open-air cinema in the sports pitch, and the bakery extends hours long enough to buy croissants at 11 p.m. If you prefer silence, book June or October instead: the light is softer, the forest smells of damp pine, and the baker greets you by name after the second visit.

Day-trip arithmetic: coast, cities, castles

With a hire car Girona’s Old Town is 35 minutes, Barcelona an hour on the AP-7 (toll €8.45). Park in Girona’s Saba underground garage under the river; spaces cost €2.40 per hour but you’re two minutes from the cathedral steps used in Game of Thrones. Closer still, the corkscrew road to the beach resort of Sant Feliu de Guíxols takes 25 minutes; on weekdays you’ll find a sand-side parking meter that accepts contactless and charges €1.20 for the afternoon.

Medieval detours worth the petrol: the pottery town of Breda (10 min), where a tiny ceramics museum lets you fire your own tile for €3, and the 10th-century castle of Montsoriu (20 min), reopened on weekends with guided tours in English if you email ahead. Combine either with lunch back in Riells and you’ll still be in siesta territory by three.

Public transport exists but demands choreography. Three daily buses reach Sant Feliu; the last return leaves at 18:10. Miss it and a taxi costs €40. Regional trains stop at nearby Caldes de Malavella; from there a local bus meets the Girona–Barcelona AVE twice a day. Check Sagalés timetables online—paper copies are never where the timetable says they should be.

Leaving without the hard sell

Riells i Viabrea will not dazzle. It offers instead a working rhythm: bread before eight, market chatter, siesta hush, evening canya, early bed. Use it as a base and you gain affordable beds, forest trails you can walk to, and a seat at a bar where the waiter remembers how you take your coffee. Expect nightlife or sea views and you’ll be disappointed by 15 km of cornfields. Choose it for what it is—a modest Catalan village that hasn’t tidied itself into a theme park—and the two bells might just ring in your head long after the flight home.