Cerdanya: the great valley of the Pyrenees

Josep Pla wrote: “La Cer­danya is one of the most beau­ti­ful, finest coun­ties in Cat­alo­nia. It is a large bowl, struc­tured on the course of the Segre, with the quirky fea­ture of drop­ping slightly, gen­tly, from east to west, in an in­clined plane. It is not a large sunken val­ley, but a re­clin­ing val­ley. Sur­rounded by high moun­tains of around three thou­sand me­tres high, La Cer­danya is not de­press­ing, like so many places in the Pyre­nees, on the con­trary it pro­duces a feel­ing of breadth, of el­e­va­tion, of lu­mi­nos­ity, of free­dom.”

Al­though it is di­vided be­tween Girona and Lleida, and part of it is in France, we can speak of a unity of cul­ture and land­scape in La Cer­danya that makes the vis­i­tor feel in­te­grated in this land with its own per­son­al­ity.

The plain, which forms one of the widest val­leys in Eu­rope, bor­ders France and An­dorra and is where the most im­por­tant peaks in the re­gion are to be found, such as Puig­pedrós (2914 m). Also there is La Baga plain, the con­flu­ence of the Pyre­nees’ Axial Zone and the pre-Pyre­nees, pro­vid­ing the re­gion with its idio­syn­crasy and cre­at­ing a cli­mate that strad­dles the At­lantic and the Mediter­ranean cli­mates. La Cer­danya gets over 3,000 hours of sun a year, mak­ing it ideal for hik­ing, but also with enough snow for plenty of ski­ing.

For the more ad­ven­tur­ous there are plenty of chal­lenges, such as climb­ing Puig­mal to get to the peak of Tossa d’Alp. But vis­i­tors can also lose them­selves in the Vall de la Llosa, a val­ley whose na­ture is pro­tected and which has such in­ter­est­ing areas as the Muga lakes. Fans of Ro­manesque cul­ture can ex­plore local churches, such as the 12th cen­tury Sant Es­teven church in Guils, or Santa Cecília in Bolvir. In this town, we can learn about the pre-Roman an­cient peo­ple known as the Cere­tani at the Espai Ceretània mu­seum, which ex­plains the ar­chae­o­log­i­cal her­itage of La Cer­danya.

Then there is Puigcerdà, the re­gion’s cap­i­tal, with its lake, Schier­beck Park, the Cerdà Mu­seum, the Town Hall square, and the Sant Domènech con­vent. Fi­nally, the local cui­sine de­serves a men­tion, which boasts such dishes as the mash made of pota­toes, cab­bage and pork known as trinxat, wild mush­room pie, or duck with black turnips.