Palau-solità i Plegamans

The 07:22 Rodalies train from Barcelona Sants still carries office workers clutching takeaway cups, but by Palau-solità i Plegamans most passengers have stepped off, leaving the carriage almost empty. Twenty-five kilometres inland, the town’s three original hamlets—Palau, Solità and Plegamans—merged long ago into a single municipality. Locals simply call the place “Palau”. The name may be a mouthful for visitors, yet the reward is a slice of everyday Catalan life that the coast lost decades ago.

Three villages rolled into one

Start at the older end, Plegamans, where Carrer Major narrows to the width of a single lorry. The Romanesque doorway of Sant Genís church has been rebuilt so often that only the stone lion corbels look their age. Opposite, the bakery Forn de Pa still sells pa de pagès (rustic country loaf) for €2.40, still warm at 9 a.m. Walk north for ten minutes and housing estates from the 1980s take over; five minutes more and you’re among glass-fronted logistics units that serve the entire Vallès plain. Palau-solità i Plegamans refuses to stay still: tractors cross roundabouts, and new apartment blocks rise beside 200-year-old masías.

Can Cortès, a fortified farmhouse from the 16th century, sums up the balancing act. The building itself is privately owned, but the council opened the surrounding land as a public park. On Saturdays the plaça fills with grandparents playing cards under the pine trees while children chase the resident gall de pardal—a speckled bantam cockerel that escaped the neighbouring allotments and now rules the lawns.

Walking, pedalling and the smell of wet earth

Altitude here is a modest 140 m, yet the Sierra de Galliners ridge pushes the town boundary up to 420 m. A signed 9-km loop, the Camí de les Ermites, leaves from the old textile mill chimney on Carrer Indústria and climbs gently through oak and Aleppo pine. Spring brings carpets of white allium and enough birdsong to drown out the distant C-16 motorway. Mountain bikers prefer the network of farm tracks south of the river Tenes; gradients are kind, though rain turns the clay into something resembling axle grease—best avoided after October storms.

If legs object, stay on the flat. The GR-177 long-distance footpath bisects the town and shadows irrigation ditches built by 19th-century mill owners. Evening dog-walkers, castellers rehearsing human-castle formations, and the occasional horse from the local riding school all share the same dusty track. Free to use, well sign-posted and level enough for sturdy pushchairs.

Food that doesn’t photograph well but tastes right

Tourism boards never know what to do with Palau’s restaurants because the menus rarely change. Cal Xim, opposite the town hall, still prints the same beige card it used in 1998: escalivada (smoky aubergine and peppers), botifarra amb mongetes (fat pork sausage with white beans) and crema catalana finished with a hot iron so the sugar forms the obligatory glass-like crust. Three courses with house wine hover around €22; service starts at 13:30 sharp and the kitchen closes at 16:00—arrive late and you’ll be offered bread and a sympathetic shrug.

Between January and March the calçot season arrives. Local associations run weekend calçotades in the orchards west of the railway line. Expect a bib, a bundle of charred spring onions sweeter than any leek, and red wine slurped from a porró. Tickets (about €30 including dessert and cava) sell out in December; book through the Ajuntament website and bring cash—card machines rarely survive the smoke.

A museum of puppets and other unlikely corners

Rainy days expose Palau’s oddest asset: the International Puppet Museum, housed in a converted 18th-century manor on Carrer de la Constitució. More than 3,000 marionettes from five continents dangle behind glass, including a papier-mâché Queen Victoria that once graced a 1930s Barcelona satire show. Entry is €5; most visitors are local school groups, so weekday mornings echo with children arguing whether the dragon or the giant should win the next story. Panels are in Catalan and English, a concession to the handful of foreign residents who arrived with tech firms in the nearby business park.

Across the street, the public library hides another curiosity: a wooden model of the 1890 steam tram that linked Palau to Granollers. The line closed in 1961, but the gauge track survives as a cycle lane—one of those rational Catalan recycling decisions that make British planners weep with envy.

Getting here, getting around, getting stuck

The simplest route is the Rodalies R4 line: 35–40 min from Barcelona Sants, €3.60 each way if you load a T-Casual ten-journey card at the airport machines. Trains run every 20 min until 22:30; after that, night buses terminate in neighbouring Mollet, and a taxi home costs around €45. Palau’s own station has lifts but no staffed ticket office—download the Rodalies app before you travel or risk a scolding from the conductor.

Once in town, everything is walkable within 25 min. A municipal bike-share scheme exists, though with only four docking stations it’s more symbolic than useful. Drivers discover another truth: free parking is plentiful because, frankly, few tourists arrive by car. The AP-7 motorway skirts the eastern edge; follow the “Polígon Palau” exit, not the town-centre sign, or you’ll be funnelled through narrow streets designed for donkeys.

When to come, when to stay away

April and May bring mild mornings and green hills without the mosquitoes that plague July. September is equally pleasant: the school term has restarted, so bars regain their weekday rhythm and swimming pools attached to rural B&Bs (Can Taberner, Can Rovira) drop to around €130 per night for a two-bedroom cottage—still cheaper than a Barcelona flat and with Wi-Fi reliable enough for Zoom calls.

August is the reverse. Half the population flees to coastal family homes; bakeries close at lunchtime and the only open café is inside the petrol station. Come then only if you crave silence and don’t mind reading the menu del día under strip lighting.

Palau-solità i Plegamans will never top a “must-see” list, and locals like it that way. It offers instead a calibration point: this is how Catalans live when cruise ships aren’t watching. Take the morning train, order the menú before the kitchen shuts, and walk the river path while the sun sets behind Galliners. No postcards required—just remember to say “Bon dia” when you pass the bakery queue.