Meditation on a Spanish church clock

The despoilation of the Mediterranean coast from Barcelona to the French border in north-eastern Spain is well known. To meet the demand for package holiday resorts in the late 1960s and the 1970s, the Catalan tourist and construction industries deployed untold quantities of reinforced concrete to dispiriting effect. Vast swaths of the Costa Brava and Costa Barcelona Maresme should be wiped from the discerning traveller’s map. Wherever there is a long, open, sandy beach which is good for swimming (and there are miles upon miles of these), a line of brutal resort hotels, apartments, bars, clubs and restaurants marches in parallel, usually behind a congested promenade.

But immediately behind lie green hills of some beauty: ridges, valleys and woods linked by tiny winding roads which no holidaymakers seem to explore. And wherever fingers of these hills claw their rocky, and tree-clad way down into the sea, the meeting creates coastline resistant to cheap development, and the brutal geometry of seaside construction is broken. More than you might realise has been overlooked by the moguls of mass tourism, so that almost under the noses of the motorways, airports and city, survive small towns and fishing villages whose development was steered during the 19th and 20th centuries by the doctors, bankers and lawyers of Barcelona seeking villas near the sea. For the rich, local charm was not to be bulldozed away; and the rich are still there. With them come restaurants and small hotels of high quality.

It was at such a hotel that we stayed for a day — a hot and hazy late August day — preferring to spend the night outside Barcelona whence we were to depart for Madrid in the morning. A good train service bustles up and down the coast by the seaside, and if you alight at Vilassar de Mar you’re less than an hour from the city.