The Empordà of Daniel Bonaventura

escapadaemporda

My Empordà is the Empordà of good restaurants, of sunny beaches, and of intellectuals with compulsive conversations. When I was small, my parents would take me to the gastronomic temples of the 70s: the Motel Empordà in Figueres and Can Narra, in Llançà. They were shopkeepers in Girona. On Mondays, our weekly break, we’d escape to the Empordà. That luminous and windy land, so wide as to seem free from the Guardia Civil (police), was like a taste of liberty after sacrificing the weekends of my youth in that dark shop in the old town of Girona, today a lucrative tourist trap.
The Empordà was so different that it had the therapeutic impact of a trip to a far away place. We liked it so much that we tried to turn our sporadic flight into a stable way of life by buying an old house that needed to be restored in Sant Pere Pescador. I cannot count the many hours we spent roasting on the fine sand of that enormous beach with its dunes and Greco-roman memories and from which you could see l’Escala and Roses united by the fine line of the horizon.
Many years have passed, and the Empordà is still solidly anchored on the West coast of the Mediterranean, inhabited by the same sceptics of always, yet enhanced by a new colourful element that is gradually making its home here. The new immigrants will become more and more Empordanese, especially if they can steal a kiss from a girl on the banks of the Fluvià near Vilarrobau; or touch the sky on a windy evening on the Coll del Frare; or wonder at the mysterious Sant Pere de Roda on a misty day; or dive into the Banyera de la Russa. Why not? They can also meditate on the roots of man contemplating the landscape as they follow the serpentines of the road from Pelacalç to Montiró; or watch the dark column of smoke from a forest fire in Vilopriu; or observe the lying Bishop of Montgrí in the distance; or be seduced by a tenor in a concert of Les Salines as they wet their teeth with new wine from Garriguella….
We could go to the exclusive concerts of Peralada and Cap Roig, taste the reasonably exquisite eccentricities elevated to an art at El Bulli or the Dali Triangle; we could leaf through El meu país, by Josep Pla, El sabater d’Ordis, by Carles Fages of Climent, or Els jugadors de wist, by Vicenç Pagés; and we could end a kaleidoscopic night with the discothèque rhythms of the Fata Morgana.
My Empordà consists of all these experiences, and the many that remain to be made. Yet from now on all will be more reflective, within our doors, conserved as something valuable in a personal trunk full of memories and experiences. // DANIEL BOVANETURA

Empordaguia

The Empordà of Daniel Bonaventura

Others