Blood, stone, a buried Jewish world, a fratricide falcon, and the family that built the best restaurant on earth.
The coloured houses along the River Onyar are in every photograph. They are as handsome in life as they are on screen. But photographs cannot convey what rises behind them: the sheer wall of the old city climbing the eastern bank, stone upon stone upon stone, from Roman foundations through medieval alleys to the cathedral at the summit.
For decades this was a stopping point – somewhere you passed through on the way to somewhere else. Barcelona had Gaudí. The coast had beaches. Girona had pretty streets and a modest reputation as one of those cities where the wine is good, the pace leisurely, the light kind, and nothing much happens.
That reputation was undeserved.
Blissfully, Girona remains a working town rather than a town that has sold its soul. You feel this the moment you arrive – in the way the locals actually use the old city, in the market stalls and school runs and evening paseos that aren’t for show. The old town is also not yet ruined. It lives on its own merits and its own rhythms rather than for the cannibalistic appetite of tourists. That said, don’t leave it too long before going. With all the upheaval in travel, the places that have been off the touristic map are likely to come under yet more pressure. The balance may soon tip.
I. A Flag Born in Blood
Catalonia hoards its myths the way old houses hoard shadows – in corners you don’t notice until the light shifts.
As the Scots have Robert the Bruce, the Catalans have Wilfred the Hairy – Count of Barcelona, Girona, and several other towns besides. Effectively he united a number of territories that we now know as Catalonia. But his memory is associated as much with myth as with historical fact. His most enduring achievement was accidental. While dying on a battlefield after fighting alongside the Frankish king, he is said to have asked for a memorial. Meeting his request, the king dipped four fingers into the count’s open wound and drew them slowly across his golden shield. The Senyera – four red bars on gold, the flag still flown from every balcony in Catalonia – was born.
It is a magnificent story. Almost certainly untrue. Charles the Bald died twenty years before Wilfred, which makes the deathbed scene difficult to stage. Heraldic shields were not used until three centuries later. No matter. When Catalans look at their flag they see sacrifice, lineage, a people that predates Spain itself. The emotional truth is the point. The Catalans are pragmatists. Long ago they uncovered the historical facts. But the historians and the people maintain a truce – neither side spoiling the turf of the other.
The earliest physical record of those four red bars? Found not on a battlefield shield but on a sarcophagus. In the Cathedral of Girona.
Which brings us to a murder.
II. A Murder the City Never Forgot
The Cathedral of Santa Maria de Girona took seven centuries to complete and contains, in its stones, some of the most extraordinary stories in Europe. It sits at the highest point of the old city. You reach it up ninety stone steps – a climb for anyone, and the same steps that Game of Thrones fans will recognise as the approach to the Great Sept of Baelor.
Start with the nave – and the argument that almost prevented it.
The architect Guillem Bofill proposed something his contemporaries found alternately thrilling and outrageous: a single undivided space of extraordinary width, no internal columns, no aisles, wider than anything outside the Vatican. The assessors brought from Barcelona to evaluate the plan found against it – for reasons that more than one historian has concluded were professional envy dressed up as structural concern. One disgruntled architect was honest enough to put it in writing: Professional envy, for a while, prevailed.
For a while. Bofill had three cardinal allies and, more lethally, patience. Two conventions were held twenty years apart. The first, loaded with Barcelona builders, voted him down. The second, in 1416, was more shrewdly constituted – expertise drawn from every major town in the region, rivalries thus multiplied until they cancelled each other out. The project was approved. Bofill spent the next decade leading the works himself.
The result is the widest Gothic nave in the world. Wider than Notre-Dame. Wider than Reims. Second only to St Peter’s in Rome across all architectural styles. The vault soars thirty-five metres overhead. I am generally resistant to architectural records – they are the stock in trade of tourist boards – but this one you feel rather than count. The space is an argument, and it’s won.
What the nave contains, among other things, is a sarcophagus. And the sarcophagus contains a murder.
Their father had despaired of his twin sons for years. Ramon Berenguer II and Berenguer Ramon II had never been easy co-rulers – the rivalry between them ran deep and continuous, visible to everyone at court, manageable only while there were enough eyes on both of them. In December 1082 they rode out together into the forests of Montnegre to hunt. Away from the city. Away from witnesses. At some point they separated. Ramon Berenguer – Cap d’Estopes, Flaxenhead, named for the colour and thickness of his hair – stayed behind, alone but for his falcon.
He never returned.
The next morning a peasant followed the cries of the falcon to a lonely clearing still known as the Goshawk’s Bank. The Count lay above a pool, stabbed. His own dagger was clean. The arithmetic, even in 1082, was not difficult. No detective was needed to reach the conclusion that the surviving brother was the likely murderer.
Berenguer Ramon ruled alone for fifteen years. No proof. No witnesses. The name that attached itself to him in that time could not be shaken: el Fratricida. The brother-killer.
What happened next is where the story refuses to be tidied into mere history. When the cortège carried the body towards the Cathedral, the falcon flew above in silence – then, drawing level with Berenguer Ramon, dived, tore the crown from his head, and fell dead on the coffin.
The priests couldn’t sing the funeral mass. They found themselves repeating a single line from Genesis, as if the words had pressed up through the floor from somewhere older than Christianity:
Ubi est Abel, frater tuus?
Where is Abel, your brother?
In 1097 Berenguer Ramon was challenged to trial by combat. He lost, and was banished. He went on crusade and died in the Holy Land. He never came back.
With the guilty man finally gone, the city needed to expiate what had been done in its midst. The answer hangs in the Cathedral treasury: the Tapestry of Creation – the Tapis de la Creació – one of the supreme surviving artworks of the European Middle Ages. At its centre a beardless Christ presides over the seven days of Creation, surrounded by concentric circles of winds, rivers, seasons and months. The historian Manuel Castineiras has proposed it was commissioned in 1097 – precisely the year of the banishment – as a public act of reparation; the story of Creation stitched carefully over the story of Cain. Whether he is right, nobody can say for certain. But the timing is exact.
Then there is the small miracle of the colours, which rivals those of the Bayeux Tapestry. When conservators removed the backing hessian in 2012, the embroidery was almost as vivid as the day the nuns put down their needles. A piece of rough sacking placed over it at some forgotten point in the medieval period had protected it from the light for a thousand years. Nobody knows who placed it there, or why. The tapestry survived on an act of anonymous care whose author will never be known.
Are you married? The locals have a lot of fun with what they call Charlemagne’s Chair – carved from Pyrenean marble, wide enough for two, set behind the high altar. Tradition holds that any couple who sit there together will marry within the year; anyone who sits alone, never will. Nobody tells you what happens if you’re happily married but only one of you sits in it. If you want to call in the lawyers, then by all means sit. Otherwise steer well away.
Personally I love the colourful storytelling as much as the colourful buildings along the river. Fittingly, there is one last story attached to the Cathedral, rounding off the fratricide that haunted the town for so long.
The remains of Cap d’Estopes lie in the Cathedral to this day, in an alabaster sarcophagus above the door of the old vestry. In 1982 – precisely nine hundred years after the murder – the original stone sarcophagus beneath was opened. Carved into its surface was the earliest known image of four red bars on gold. The Senyera. The flag Catalonia traces to the blood of Wilfred the Hairy was first found, it turned out, on the tomb of a fratricide.
Blood on a shield. Blood in a forest clearing. Girona keeps offering you the same pattern: things buried and hidden, then a spectacular revelation.
III. A Secret World Rediscovered
Below the Cathedral steps and to the left, the old city narrows. The alleys become steeper, more vertical, more stone. The Call – Girona’s Jewish quarter – dates to 885 CE, making it one of the oldest Jewish settlements in Western Europe.
For four centuries it was the intellectual centre of Kabbalistic scholarship in the medieval West. Its most famous resident was Nahmanides – Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman, philosopher, physician, Talmudic scholar. Whatever the name given him, history is clear. This is the man who in 1263 was summoned by King James I of Aragon to defend Judaism against Christianity in public debate before the royal court. He was the sole representative for the Jewish side, the odds deliberately stacked against him. His opponent was a Dominican friar, more dangerous for having himself converted from Judaism.
Yet Nahmanides won. He eviscerated his interrogators point by point in one of the only recorded occasions in medieval Spain where the Christian side was conclusively routed. King James awarded his prize money and promised protection. Nahmanides probably already knew the promise would not hold. The Dominicans appealed to Rome. He was banished, sailed for Palestine, and died there. He never returned to Girona.
Many consider Nahmanides’ fate to be the starting gun of mounting anti-semitism in Catalonia. Two centuries later, in 1492, the Alhambra Decree – signed by Ferdinand and Isabella – expelled all Jews from Spain. Girona’s Jewish community scattered across Europe. Fearful of being killed, they left hurriedly. A few converted, but by far the majority simply walled off their homes and disappeared into exile. Unusually, nobody wanted to move into the abandoned houses – any occupant risked being identified as Jewish. As a result, the life of the quarter, the yeshiva, the narrow stairways, the sealed alleys: all of it remained hidden. For a full five hundred years, another revelation waited.
In the 1970s, as Girona’s old town began to gentrify, a poet named Josep Tarrés bought several buildings with the intention of opening a restaurant. The builders he sent in began to demolish interior walls. One of them nearly fell through a gap they had not expected – and found himself looking at what appeared to be an abandoned medieval street, sealed and untouched, hidden inside the fabric of later construction.
What they had found was Nahmanides’ yeshiva.
The discovery changed how Girona understood itself. The timing mattered: Franco had just died, Spain was democratic for the first time in forty years, and Catalonia was recovering its suppressed identity. The poet Jaume de Nadal – whose own surname appears in lists of Judeo-Spanish names, suggesting that his ancestors may themselves have been of Jewish origin before conversion – was working in the old town. Nadal understood that the parallel was not accidental. The Call was Catalan history. Both peoples had been erased by decree; both deserved recovery.
The discovery changed how Girona understood itself. The timing mattered: Franco had just died, Spain was democratic for the first time in forty years, and Catalonia was recovering its suppressed identity. Girona’s first freely elected mayor since the Civil War was Joaquim Nadal i Farreras – not a poet but a professor of contemporary history, which turned out to matter considerably more. Nadal understood immediately what a less historically literate mayor might have missed: that Girona was a small provincial city surrounded by larger rivals, and that the sealed world discovered in its walls gave it something none of them had.
The parallel between Catalan and Jewish experience was not forced. Both peoples knew what it meant to have an outside power decide that their language, culture and name on the map was an inconvenience to be erased. Under Franco, Catalan had been banned in public life. The city’s name had been changed to the Castilian Gerona. The recovery of the Call was a political mission – for the Jewish diaspora and for the Catalans alike.
There was a further detail that gave the story an irresistible personal edge. The surname Nadal appears in published lists of Judeo-Spanish names. When asked whether his own family might be of Jewish origin, the mayor replied with characteristic precision: “We don’t know with certainty. Nadal is of Jewish origin. It was also a name given in Catalonia to foundlings baptised at the Nativity.” The ambiguity kept everybody guessing and happy.
What’s certain is that Nadal was a born pragmatist. Articles appeared in the American Jewish press – the New York Jewish Week, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency – reaching communities with both the emotional connection and the financial resources to support what Girona was doing. Money followed. The Bonastruc ça Porta Centre – named after Nahmanides’ Catalan name – was established at the heart of the restored Call, alongside the Nahmanides Institute for Jewish Studies and the Museum of Jewish History.
Finally, the government of Israel sent consultants to help restore the yeshiva of the scholar their state had, in a sense, inherited. Israeli musicians came each summer. In 1998 Israel’s chief Sephardic rabbi lit Hanukkah candles beside the Gironella Tower – the first such ceremony in Spain since the expulsion. Nearly a thousand people attended, most of them not Jewish.
Hebrew is taught again at the Bonastruc ça Porta Centre, five centuries after it was last spoken in the city. It is not heritage tourism. It is a city choosing to define itself through the recovery of a history it had been taught to forget.
Fair warning: the Call’s secret is no longer a secret. In summer it heaves. But the bones of the place are stronger than the footfall – the alleys were built for a community that lived here, not visitors passing through, and that purpose is still legible in the stone. April, October, the weeks either side of Temps de Flors: that is when the quarter gives you what it actually has to offer.
IV. The Foodie Paradise That is Affordable
Calling all foodies. In 2025, the International Institute of Gastronomy, Culture, Arts and Tourism named Catalonia the World Region of Gastronomy – the first European region to receive the designation. The French and Italians are rumoured to be somewhat put out by this. That is also part of Catalan culinary tradition.
It has deep roots. The oldest known cookbook in the Iberian Peninsula – the Llibre de Sent Soví, written in 1324 – is Catalan. It pre-dates its nearest rival by a century. There are recipes for sauces built on almond and hazelnut, for salt cod preparations still recognisable in Catalan cooking today, for medicinal broths of a refinement that would not embarrass a modern kitchen. The food culture of Catalonia was already sophisticated when the rest of Europe was still boiling things until they stopped moving.
What is remarkable about Girona specifically is the democracy of it. Most food destinations require research: the one great restaurant, the two exceptional bars, discovered by sustained investigation. Girona is different. You can walk into almost any establishment in the old town and eat well. The food culture is not concentrated at the top end; it pervades the whole city. You will find a good meal at lunch for twelve euros in a bar with a handwritten menu. You will find it at dinner for three hundred. At either end you will rarely feel taken for a ride.
Between the two extremes, locals and visitors are spoilt for choice. My husband, who has in his time been lucky enough to visit some of the world’s top restaurants, could scarcely believe what he was tasting. As a result, although we live in the South of France, Girona has become our favourite place to celebrate our respective birthdays and our wedding anniversary.
Which brings us, inevitably, to the Roca brothers.
V. A Family, a Restaurant and a Revolution
In 1967, Josep Roca, a bus driver, and his wife Montserrat Fontane, a cook, opened a bar-restaurant called Can Roca on the outskirts of Girona. Franco was still in power. Catalan was banned in public life. The city was officially Gerona. Opening a restaurant was, in its small way, an act of cultural stubbornness. They had three sons: Joan, born in 1964; Josep, two years later; and Jordi, born in 1978. All three grew up in the restaurant.
Nobody would call this family aristocratic. And yet it is the Rocas who have come to embody Girona’s understanding of what food is for. There is something almost Republican in what they have built – in the best Catalan sense of that word. The instinct that runs through recent Catalonian history, that culture should belong to everyone and not be ring-fenced by wealth or class, has translated itself in the Roca family into food.
Joan enrolled at the Escola d’Hostaleria i Turisme de Girona – a hospitality school operating since 1965 – and in 1986, aged twenty-two, opened El Celler de Can Roca next door to his parents’ bar with his brother Josep. Their first dish was hake with rosemary and garlic vinaigrette. Joan spent a formative season at El Bulli, returned, and built methodically a culinary language fusing his mother’s Catalan kitchen with French classicism and Spanish avant-garde invention. The first Michelin star came in 1995. The second in 2002. The third in 2009. In 2013 and again in 2015, El Celler de Can Roca was named the best restaurant in the world. It now holds a permanent place in the World’s 50 Best hall of fame alongside El Bulli, Noma and The French Laundry – retired from ranking on account of having won too many times.
The reservation system operates on an eleven-month rolling window. Demand is what you would expect. As their reputation became stratospheric, the Rocas did something that tells you everything about their philosophy towards food. It is almost a political stance.
But first – a family enterprise always throws up its rivalries. Once again, brothers feature heavily in the myth-making of contemporary Girona, a fact that comes out in the recent Netflix documentary on Jordi, the youngest, who for years struggled to escape the shadow of his two older brothers. On his own admission he was floundering, unable to make his mark. That is until a British man came to the rescue.
Casa Cacao grew from a single transformative influence. In 1997 a young British pastry chef named Damian Allsop – formerly head of pastry at Gordon Ramsay’s Aubergine – arrived at El Celler. The then nineteen-year-old Jordi saw a chance to differentiate himself from his brothers, and Allsop encouraged him to find his own recipes and his own rhythm. Then, just as his protégé had gained sufficient confidence, Allsop suffered a life-changing accident – a fall that left him in a wheelchair for six months, with a long and uncertain recovery ahead. He returned to London.
Jordi had no choice but to work things out for himself. It turned out to be the making of him, and set the foundations for two new institutions in Girona. Alone at nineteen, he began to play – making smoke edible, building desserts from perfumes, eventually being named World’s Best Pastry Chef in 2014. Meanwhile in London, with time to think, Allsop made a revolutionary discovery: the water ganache, using water instead of cream to let chocolate speak entirely for itself. Eight years after his departure he returned to El Celler, this time employed by his former apprentice. Their reunion produced Casa Cacao: a chocolate factory, café, shop and boutique hotel sharing one former townhouse on the Plaça de Catalunya, the bean-to-bar process visible through street-level windows. The hotel above was the project of Anna Payet, Joan’s wife – who had met him in the 1980s when she was a tourism student and he a young teacher at the same hospitality school. She tested and slept in every room before signing them off. Breakfast here is not a transaction. It is an argument for being somewhere rather than everywhere at once.
Rocambolesc, their ice cream parlour on the Rambla de la Llibertat, is where Jordi applied his full technical intelligence to the question of what ice cream could be. Flavours built on olive oil, black truffle, the distilled essence of childhood summers. The queue is worth it.
And then there is Normal – a few minutes’ walk from El Celler, Catalan cooking, reasonable prices, no reservation required. Built for their friends, their neighbours, and everyone for whom El Celler’s prices are a barrier or simply beside the point. You eat well, you talk, you have another glass of wine. The name was deliberately chosen.
Where to Sleep and Why it Matters Less Than Where You Eat
Hotel de Nord is the sensible choice for those who do not want to spend their entire budget on somewhere to sleep and would prefer to spend it on something to eat. I have stayed here several times. The rooms are clean; if you upgrade, there is usually a bath. What counts for me are location, friendly staff, and reception rooms. On all three fronts, the Nord scores. The Argentinian receptionist on my last visit was irredeemably cheerful and helpful whatever we asked him. The library and reading room is a genuine pleasure – a wonderful place to wait out a summer downpour, with books you can actually read. The bar and breakfast room looks out onto the swimming pool. The hotel sits just outside the old town, five minutes from the famous bridge, and convenient for the old city’s excellent independent clothes shops.
Hotel Palau Fugit is the other option – a former palacio converted with considerable flair, full of gorgeous spaces. Several rooms have little balconies that look down onto the cobblestones; the designer specified beautiful double shutters to manage the light and noise, which makes the difference between a good night’s sleep and a long one. The spa is serious – La Cova is worth booking in advance, and the reflexology and Japanese face lift offered by Leticia and Verónica are the kind of treatments that justify the trip independently of everything else. On a browsing pass through the common rooms, a guest might find a collection of short stories by the celebrated Catalan writer Josep Pla – a novelist who turned to journalism to pay the bills, whose publisher once compared him, breathlessly, to Joseph Roth. The comparison is not entirely without justification.
Four Tables That Justify the Journey
L’Arros | Carrer dels Ciutadans, 20
This is the kind of place a savvy local taxi driver steers you towards rather than any algorithm. The ritual starts before you sit down: you are led to the fish counter where the day’s catch – tellines, razor clams, prawns, whole fish on ice – is laid out in front of you. You choose what you want and how you want it cooked: grilled, fried, or from the oven. Only then are you shown to your table. It’s theatre with purpose, and it keeps the food honest. Starters are designed for sharing; the focus is fish and rice, though there is an entrecôte for anyone at the table who insists on meat. Rice dishes can be ordered for one person, which is unusually considerate. The wine list is well chosen. Go with appetite and without rushing.
Dinner: Thursday to Saturday, 19:30-21:30. Book ahead and respect the hours – they ask you to, and there’s a reason for it.
Arròs9 | Carrer Ginesta, 8
Hidden down a small side street and easy to miss – which would be a shame. A tiny, beautifully decorated room with a short menu and exceptional rice dishes. The daily lunch menu runs from around €10 to €25 and the kitchen is visible from the dining room. The cooking leans Catalan-Mediterranean: duck magret dry rice, Galician octopus, roast croquettes, and desserts such as cava soup with lemon sorbet and red fruit foam. Portions of rice take time – allow forty minutes and order starters so you’re not watching the clock. The team is young and genuinely committed. The wine selection is wide for the size of the room.
Cipresaia | Carrer Bonaventura Carreras i Peralta 5
Cipresaia carries its name with history: in April 1978, Quico Viader opened one of Girona’s most celebrated restaurants on this site in the heart of the historic quarter. The building has been handed on; the standards have not been lowered. Head chef Victor Camacho and owner Xavi Carol continue the legacy through a contemporary lens – Catalan tradition reinterpreted with French culinary touches, rooted in ingredients sourced from local farmers, fishermen and producers. The menu moves through mains, ember-cooked dishes and desserts, with a tasting menu for those who want the full argument. Open for lunch and dinner, closed Sundays and Mondays.
Book at cipresaia.cat | Tel: +34 872 20 82 22
Divinum | Carrer de l’Albereda, 7
One Michelin star, one very good reason to book ahead. Divinum occupies a room in Girona’s former Casino – all low ceilings, dark walls and a wine cellar that takes itself seriously – and has been earning its reputation for over twenty years. The owners Joan and Laura run the room themselves, which shows in the quality of the service: attentive without hovering, knowledgeable without performing. You can order à la carte with half-portions available – a civilised touch – or choose between two tasting menus, the Petit and the Essencia. The cooking is modern Catalan with its eye firmly on the past: Maresme peas with pil-pil broth, cod tripe and truffle shavings; a steak tartare that won best in Spain in 2022; a version of escalivada that bears almost no resemblance to what you were expecting, and is better for it. The cheese trolley runs to over twenty varieties. The wine list is exceptional.
One further endorsement, for those who need it: this is Joan Roca’s favourite restaurant in Girona. He is not a man who flatters easily.
Book at dvnum.com | Tel: +34 872 08 02 18
VI. Timing it Right – With Flowers
Every May, Girona hosts Temps de Flors – a nine-day flower festival that transforms the entire old city into an open-air exhibition. The steps of the Cathedral. The alleys of the Call. The Arab Baths. Private courtyards not accessible at any other time of year. Over 130 installations, assembled by local artists, flower growers and design schools. According to your tolerance for crowds – around 200,000 visitors attend – it is either the perfect moment to visit or the moment to avoid.
The detail nobody puts in the tourism brochure: Temps de Flors was founded in 1954 by volunteers from the Falange Española Tradicionalista – Franco’s single legal political party. The women who organised the first festival did so under a regime that banned the Catalan language and suppressed the culture it sprang from. Whether they intended it as consolation or defiance or simply beauty in a difficult time, the festival they created has become the most joyful, colourful celebration of everything Franco tried to destroy. All exhibitions are free of charge.
There are few things more pleasant than spending a May evening in Girona’s old town during Temps de Flors – a cold glass of something in hand, an evening that stretches ahead with no particular plan, flowers arranged with genuine artistry in a courtyard that has stood for five hundred years. If there is someone alongside you whose company you find agreeable, so much the better.
Getting There
Girona is thirty-eight minutes from Barcelona by AVE high-speed train, and approximately ninety minutes from Barcelona airport. El Celler de Can Roca opens reservations eleven months in advance at midnight on the first of each month. Rocambolesc, Casa Cacao, Normal and the other Roca venues require no reservation or accept bookings on shorter notice. Temps de Flors takes place annually in May. The Museum of Jewish History and the Cathedral Treasury are open year-round.
