Hostalric and the legacy of the Cabreras

In 1810, Hostal­ric was on the verge of dis­ap­pear­ing. French troops com­manded by Pierre François Augereau, who were ob­sessed with gain­ing entry into Girona and con­sid­ered the town to be the city’s first line of de­fence, turned the for­mer ad­min­is­tra­tive cap­i­tal of the Cabr­era dy­nasty into a ruin. After five months of siege and more than 6,000 bombs, only four of the two hun­dred houses in the town re­mained in­tact.

How­ever, the mis­for­tune did not man­age to erase Hostal­ric’s his­tory and today the vis­i­tor will find a ren­o­vated town that re­tains signs of its mil­i­tary past when it acted as a strong­hold. For ex­am­ple, in the high street are still to be found mil­i­tary in­scrip­tions, such as “Cap­tain”, “Colonel”, or “Of­fi­cer”, on the houses where the of­fi­cers of the gar­ri­son were tem­porar­ily bil­leted. Mean­while, a walk along Car­rer Major or Car­rer del Raval re­veals that each home re­tains its patronymic and the town hall, lo­cated in the old con­vent of Sant Francesc de Paula pro­tected by the Torre de les Hores, con­trasts with the power of the walls that show that the town was once one of the most im­por­tant in the Selva area.

Hostal­ric’s cob­bled streets in­vite a leisurely stroll among unique shops and first-class restau­rants. Mean­while, those with the legs for it might like to take a walk up to the cas­tle, which used to main­tain con­trol over the Royal Road and that in the 17th cen­tury was adapted to the new de­fen­sive tech­niques of the day. The cas­tle con­tin­ued to act as a mil­i­tary strong­hold until 1929, after which it be­came one of the town’s key land­marks to visit. In 2015 the Cas­tle In­ter­pre­ta­tion Cen­tre was opened.

Yet Hostal­ric also pre­serves a legacy that goes even fur­ther back, to the Mid­dle Ages, when the town was a pos­ses­sion of the House of Cabr­era, the Cata­lan dy­nasty that rose to rule the Vis­county of Girona. In fact, we can still find a mill that dates back to me­dieval times and even today is known as the mill of the vis­counts.

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