Nice places

The Perfect Hideaway

~ Kate Wilson ~ 6 Comments

Things have been a little stressful recently so we were glad to have the holiday which here is called El Pont de L’Immaculada. Pont means bridge and the name comes from the fact that there is a public holiday on December 6th as well as December 8th  so the middle day, the pont, is also taken off.

Without any hesitation we decided to head for the hills.
North of Vic and before you reach the Pyranees there is an area called Llaers which is not as well known as other places and so even at this pre christmas holiday it was very quiet.

The Hotel de Serra is very simple, very relaxed, very welcoming to Springer Spaniels, and very peaceful.
The area is full of oak woods and the floors and beams in the hotel are old oak.  There are lots of little nooks with log fires which invite you to spend the evening reading or playing cards.


The food was very basic – chunky bread, hot soups, goats cheese, country sausages for breakfast and large carafes of strong red wine.

Outside they have goats and ducks and geese and peacocks.

Calm confident dogs potter about and there are cats in the barns.

There are walks to nearby castles and when you come home it is the sort of place that doesn’t care about a little mud on the stairs from your boots. I think it was Duna’s best holiday EVER!

 

To rescue or to leave alone?

~ Kate Wilson ~ 5 Comments

 

The weather here has been very changeable recently – some days sunshine, most days rain and occasionally a gigantic thunderstorm. The local news is full of stories of flooding and 6 metre waves lashing the coast.   As today was a festa we drove up to the Costa Brava to see the sea.It wasn’t really stormy by Cornish standards but fairly bracing and pleasantly quiet on the beaches. We had lunch in Lloret de Mar which in summer is a nightmare of tourists and traffic and, like so many beautiful coastal towns has been blighted by the Francoist property developers in the 60’s and 70’s. But if you turn your back on the ugly apartment blocks and look out to sea it is stunning. There is a colony of wild cats living here.They were more tame than their city cousins – it is unusual to be able to stroke a street cat but these ones were heart-breakingly interested in getting close. I want to write more about the cats I meet here soon – they have a tough life. People feed them but it’s not easy on the streets. There was one tortoiseshell here in Lloret who wound her way around my legs and seemed accustomed to being with humans. She was very thin although her fur was soft and glossy. Of course I thought about taking her home but what does this ‘rescue’ mean?  Would life as a well fed city cat without a garden be better than being part of this wild free colony by the beach? What do you think?

Chatting in the wash house

~ Kate Wilson ~ 4 Comments

 

There is a town near here called Caldes de Montbui.

I went there when my sister and my nephew were visiting, to bathe in the hot mineral baths in one of the spas. The one we chose was a beautiful building with modernist interiors called Broquetas. The water comes from the ground at more than 70 degrees and has to be cooled before you can comfortably get in. There are various places in the town where the water spurts out of fountains and I’ve heard that some houses have their own supply.Last weekend we went back again, this time to see our friend Paula Kramer doing a dance performance as part of a project called Miau I first met my partner on one of Paula’s workshops in the Pyranees – her speciality is dancing creatively in nature and in so many ways it was a healing and life changing weekend. It always feels special to see her and the other friends that I met on that workshop.
Some of these photos are a bit misty and dark but if you tilt the screen you can get the picture and I like the way they are rather mysterious and watery.This performance took place in a Safareig – a communal wash house that uses the natural hot water and has a large central stone tub where women used to come to wash their laundry and talk. There is a Catalan phrase ‘fer safareig‘ which means to gossip – a word that in English has some negative associations but which I think also describes a vital and caring way of passing on news about your friends aquaintances and family. Womens communications – so many words that are pejorative – nagging, bitching, gossiping….
This town now also has a large community of people from Mali and some of these women have begun to use the Safareig as a meeting place and for washing clothes again. There are three Safareigs in Caldes and one of them seemed derelict and sad although as part of the project it was being used as a grafitti house where you could write your desires on the walls.
At the end of the performances people were invited to have a hot bath in the tub – I dangled in my feet and legs but wasn’t tempted to plunge in when it started to fill up with hot steamy bodiesBut it was an incredible scene.

Wild swims

~ Kate Wilson ~ 7 Comments

 


Before I left Cornwall last year I read a book called Waterlog by the late Roger Deakin and I find it has stuck with me – memories of some of his wild outdoor water adventures have become permanent images in my imagination and they help me when I am hesitating to take the plunge. If he could fling himself into an icy lake in Cumbria then surely I can do the same in the Pyranees? Over the past year I have swum of course many times in the sea but also in mountain rivers, lakes, woodland pools and, for sometime in the future, there is the tantalising dream of a dip in a totally wild unspoilt natural hot water mineral pool.This favourite pool is deep and mysterious and isolated – you walk a long way up river to get there and are rewarded with a magical setting. I am sure Les Dones D’Aigua live here. That strange shape is my reflection in the water – it was totally clear.A deceptively gentle looking river – it was impossible to swim upstream against the current. Had to wear my bathing costume here so it lacked that ‘je ne sais quoi’ of wildness.Duna’s first long swim – like me she prefers calm waters.These last pictures are of another hidden pool in the mountains of Montseny. Almost too cold even for me – but I did it!
And the dream of an open air natural hot spring? I heard of one close to the Bains of St Thomas in Catalunya Nord but we were leaving that day so it waits for next time….

Bains de St Thomas

~ Kate Wilson ~ 1 Comment

 

We went in the van to Catalunya Nord last week so called as it is widely seen as being a part of Catalunya although officially it is on the French side of the Pyrenees. Past clamp downs on the language mean that only the old and the young now speak Catalan there but it is now taught in schools. The highlight – for me – was our afternoon in the hot sulphur bathes of St Thomas. Being a great fan of indulgent lazing about I always head for these places if they are available and luckily for me there are lots of centres – Balnearis – to try out. Some are closer to home and I will write about them as I gradually work my way around them!Set in the mountains it is the perfect way to relax after a long walk up one of the highest mountains in the region – Canigó.