Everything on our doorstep

When I ar­rived in Cat­alo­nia in 1990, my stay in the coun­try was sup­posed to be short. It was also sup­posed to be just the first stop in a world tour that would sa­ti­ate the cu­rios­ity of youth and turn me into a man of the world. It is now get­ting on for 30 years and I still haven’t seen Flo­rence, or Moscow, or Sin­ga­pore. I some­times think of all those moun­tains I never climbed, those beaches I never laid on, those mu­se­ums I never vis­ited. As a species we evolved as no­mads and so the de­sire to keep mov­ing and find new places is part of our DNA. I some­times won­der why some­one would strug­gle to pay for a lux­ury car, or fork out a for­tune on an ex­pen­sive paint­ing. How­ever, the fact that peo­ple are will­ing to in­vest a good chunk of their earn­ings on vis­it­ing a place they have never been to sim­ply be­cause they have never been there sort of makes sense. We are pro­grammed to ex­plore.

I, too, have spent plenty of money on trav­el­ling since then, and have been for­tu­nate enough to visit some half a dozen coun­tries on my orig­i­nal list. How­ever, with a fam­ily, a mort­gage, work, and so on, the chances that I will one day stuff a few clothes and my pass­port into a back­pack and take off are just about zero. Yet, the nomad in me will not be qui­etened, and some­how still finds a way to ex­press it­self. For me, at my age, it is my group of mo­tor­bik­ing friends. All around 50, all fa­thers and hus­bands, all con­tin­u­ally busy and work­ing full time, we nev­er­the­less man­age to find a few week­ends every year to fire up our bikes and get away from it all. And, with only a cou­ple of nights of leave, Cat­alo­nia has be­come our play­ground.

What this coun­try has to offer the trav­eller never ceases to amaze me. From snow-topped moun­tains to sun-drenched beaches, winer­ies, cas­tles, mu­se­ums, for­est of pine and oak, glis­ten­ing wet­lands and bustling cities, arid plains and wa­ter­falls, me­dieval monas­ter­ies and vine­yards, lux­ury restau­rants and spas, vil­lage fes­ti­vals and wildlife sanc­tu­ar­ies, an­cient re­mains, hunt­ing, ski­ing, gal­leries and the sim­ple plea­sure of a cold beer in a square.

I would never dis­cour­age any­one from giv­ing in to their wan­der­lust, and I too in­tend to catch a few more planes to see what the world has to offer be­fore I am done. How­ever, as the itin­er­aries we offer this month (pages 20-31) show, Cat­alo­nia may be a small coun­try but has such a wealth of var­ied sights and ex­pe­ri­ences to offer the vis­i­tor that it fully de­serves its sta­tus as one of the most pop­u­lar tourist des­ti­na­tions in the world.