It was a huge effort to get myself off the couch and into the car on Sunday to drive to Caldes de Montbui.  I’m struggling a lot at the moment to find energy to go out.  I like walking into Granollers for coffee and cake, I am fine about driving to the beach at St Pol or taking the high road to the Costa Brava and Sant Nicolau. But every time we plan to do something cultural here in Granollers, I start to feel sleepy, to crave another chapter of Anthony Trollope, to remember emails I need to send.

But, in the end we went and of course the healing waters of one of the Catalan spa towns gave me a massive energy boost which I am still feeling today.

There was a dance and art festival on there this weekend. It is called Miao and I wrote about it before here.  Caldes is an amazing place with constantly running hot mineral water which you can sample in the various balnearis in town. It is also available in the safareigs which were traditionally the places the women went to wash the clothes

The first performance was in the vegetable allotments below the church. What a place!

  It is an incredibly beautiful vegetable patch with lemon trees

 and peppers plants and little ditches which carry the mineral water around the land

We all walked in single file along the narrow walls.

 Afterwards Pep and I went for a beer and missed the second performance in the little safareig where two years ago we wrote our desires on the walls.  Instead we watched the bars and cafes preparing for the Barça Madrid match.  And then we went back for the next dance, described in Part Two!