[CATALONIA, SPAIN] — So I was sitting in a cool hotel on the edge of the Sahara one day before I was scheduled to fly back to the States. I’d been on the road for a month in Portugal and Morocco, but I wasn’t ready to go back quite yet.

So I cancelled my return flight, flew to Barcelona, walked up to the Hertz desk and asked “Can I rent a car for two months?”  “Si! Si, Señor!”

I had no plan. And a lot of time. I was in heaven.

I didn’t really have a plan or destination in mind, but I looked at a map and the towering mountains of the Spanish Pyrenees and just headed in that direction. Didn’t really know anything about this area and, with little time for research, I just looked on Relais & Chateaux website and found a cool looking hotel in a town I’d never heard of — La Seu d’Urgell — but figured I’d just go there, get a map and root around for something cool.  Boy did I luck out.

__________________________________

__________________________________

This is just a stunning part of Spain, about two hours north of Barcelona, with perfect loopy driving roads, no crowds and mountains out the wazoo as Spain backs right up to the Pyrenean border with France. Yumyumyum.

How come nobody ever talks about this amazing place?

There are more than a dozen different natural park preserves all along the spine with France. Small villages huddled by mountain lakes. Endless perfect trails and small hotels. You don’t read much, if anything, about this area in the American travel press. Even a little harder to find a lot of info in English. So I was there just poking my way around. Stumbling onto one remarkable thing after another.

The Famed N260 Highway — One of the Best Touring Roads in the World

This long, slender valley is world famous for its smooth, uncrowded cruising roads, which is why the Tour de France ran through here in 2016. And more so for touring motorcycles. I saw more purring BMW road cruisers than cars around here. (And the occasional group of Harley People, wearing their predictable little costumes, making stupid noise.) And the rest were groups of road bike teams going “huthuthut!” up the steep hills.

The famed N260 winds in the valleys just under the Catalan Pyrenees. Smooth rolling hills, nice paving and little traffic make this a global mecca for motorcycle touring. People even ship their bikes to ride here.

 Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici National Park

The Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici National Park is about the longest-named park I can recall. Loosely translated, it means “The winding streams and St. Maurice lake park”. That’s damn romantic for a park name.

It nuzzles right up under the sweet-smelling underarm of France, right along the Spanish side of the Pyrenees. Like most European parks, this one’s free. There are some great, easy hikes through here. And hard ones if you want to get above treeline.

You can pull into the small town of Espot and park there. From there you can hike up, or they have 4×4 taxis that can take you into the park. Then you can come back down and have a nice beer or lunch. There are a few small hotels in town, some people stay for multi-day adventures.

And this is when it get really interesting. Els Encantats. The giant cloven-hoofed spike coming out of the ground, dominating everything around. You really can’t tell how big it is until you look to the right of it and see a whole other range dwarfed by its forked-tongue peaks. You continue up the valley, looking back over the lake.

I think you’d like it here.

Seriously, one of the prettiest and easiest hikes around. Zigzagging between the cows and the lake and that massive cloven foot mountain. I only passed a couple of couples on my four hours I spent up here with my head in the clouds.

La Seu d’Urgell

La Seu d’Urgell is a humble little town with a nice old quarter. But what makes it perfect is its location smack in the middle of all these tallboy Spanish Pyrenees and easy access to Andorra and all the other Aragon highlands. I still can’t pronounce it. (La say-u dur-zhey.)

La Seu d’Urgell is the a good central base to explore the Spanish Pyrenees. Perfect hilltop tops, towering mountains, roaring rivers and scenic roads.

This is the capital of Adventureland. Biking. Riding. Rafting. Kayaking. Hiking. Mountain Climbing. Just about everything up-and-down to do. It was also the base for the river sports part of the Barcelona Olympics and there’s a world class kayak course that flows right through town. Perfect to chill for an hour or two watching others get wet. But also, with all that athlete and fan housing there’s a ton of housing options at every price range, making the ugly modern buildings likable.

The Serra del Cadí. The whole town is oriented towards this massive big unibrow range.

Like staring down the unibrow of Harry Hamlin. (Some youngers may have to google that). The Serra del Cadí. As the sun and clouds move throughout the day, it looks like a completely different scene.
Smiley. Too broody. Too stormy. Back to smiley again. Never gets old. There’s a whole park build around this Rhodesian Ridgeback of a mountain range — the Cadí-Moixeró Natural Park. I only had a few nights here, but will definitely come back.

But the old quarter is cool too, with peeps living here since pre-Roman times under dark covered stone passageways and restaurants. The big Romanesque cathedral in the middle of town is know for its oldness and Romanesqueness.

Where to Stay in La Seu d’Urgell

[NOTE: Recently I was checking for this hotel on Google Maps and it said it was temporarily closed, so double check if they’re open. They might be renovating.]

El Castell de Ciutat is a nice little family-run hotel high on a hilltop just outside the town of La Seu d’Urgell, the perfect base to explore this whole area of the Spanish Pyrenees.

It’s a little old school, but clean and super friendly people who can show you where you need to go. It’s a Relais & Chateaux property, so you know they’ll have a great restaurant, which they do, in a glassed-in dining room looking straight out over the entire valley and the looming Cadí-Moixeró hunk of solid rock.

Super nice people, very helpful on pointing out places to go. It was not quite up to par with the typical Relais & Chateaux, a little out of date, but I’ve read that it has been undergoing a restoration.

— Last Visited May 2015, Post Updated June 2024 — 

More Information on The Spanish Pyrenees

Here is one of the best articles in English I’ve seen about the Aragon region in The Telegraph — I wish I had it at the time. Here’s a great recent story from The Telegraph about great places to go on Catalunya that aren’t Barcelona.

I could never find a lot about this area in English. But here’s the top hotels in La Seu d’Urgell on TripAdvisor.

I pretty much just ate at the restaurant in the hotel — it is a Relais & Chateaux property after all — because I’d drive and hike all day long, then get back, shower, order the lamb and watch the sunset over the valley below. But here’s TripAdvisor’s top restaurants in the area.

And very little in Lonely Planet. And some pretty good overview details in the Rough Guide. And a little on this website Rural Pyrenees Guide.

Here’s a beautiful article in National Geographic on Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici National Park. I wish I’d seen this before going. DOH!  And some decent tips on TripAdvisor. And a really sweet review of the park by the Belgian travel blogger Wonderful Wanderings.

If you like hiking, here’s a link to some amazing hikes just on the other side of these mountains in the French Pyrenees.   And a post exploring the Costa Brava, Half hour from here.