The Quiet Coast of the Costa Brava

The name has done the Costa Brava a disservice. Say it and most people picture the package resorts of the 1970s — the concrete towers, the crowded beaches, the sunburn and the sangria. That coast exists, in patches, and it is easily avoided. Beyond it lies the Costa Brava the name actually describes: the “wild coast”, a rugged shore of pine-covered cliffs, hidden coves, and old fishing villages that the mass tourism never reached. It is one of the Mediterranean’s great quiet coasts, and it rewards the traveller who knows to look past the reputation.

A coast that earns its name

“Brava” means wild, and the northern stretches of this Catalan coast are exactly that. The land does not slope gently to the sea but drops to it in cliffs of grey rock, clothed in dark pine and aromatic scrub, broken by small coves where the water is a startling clear turquoise over pale stone. There are no long straight beaches here — the coast is too rugged for them — but a series of small, sheltered inlets, some reachable only on foot or by boat, each its own private-feeling world.

This ruggedness is what saved the northern Costa Brava from the developers. The mass resorts wanted flat land and long beaches, and where the coast offered neither, the old fishing villages survived more or less intact. To walk this coast is to move between them — a cove, a headland, a village, another cove — along a path that follows the cliff-tops with the sea always below. It is walking of the finest kind, and it belongs to the same family of dramatic Mediterranean coastlines we chart in the quiet coast of northern Sardinia.

The coastal path

The great way to see the wild Costa Brava is on foot, along the old coastal path that once linked the fishing villages and the watchtowers and now serves the walker. It hugs the cliffs, dipping down to each cove and climbing back up to each headland, and it delivers a succession of views and swimming spots that no road could reach. This is not a strenuous long-distance trek but a series of gentle, beautiful walks between villages, each a morning’s amble with a swim and a lunch at the end.

The wild Costa Brava is best measured on foot, cove by cove — a swim, a walk along the cliffs, a lunch of fish by the water, and the whole thing again the next day.

The reward for choosing this coast over its louder neighbours is a version of the Mediterranean that most visitors assume has vanished — working villages, empty coves, and a shore still shaped by the land rather than the developer. It has survived precisely because it is a little harder to reach and a little harder to lie on, and long may that remain true. The traveller willing to walk a cliff path to a cove finds a coast the coach tours never see. Further up the same coastline the shoreline softens into wide bays, and our guide to the quiet coast of the Gulf of Roses picks up the story. For an Atlantic coast of an altogether wilder temperament, our piece on the quiet coast of the Costa da Morte continues the theme.

Walk a stretch in the morning before the heat, swim in a cove along the way, and arrive at a village in time for lunch. This is slow coastal travel at its finest, the journey and the destination the same thing, and it rewards the traveller who takes it at a walking pace rather than a driving one. The pleasure rhymes with the Greek islands, whose quiet corners we explore in the quiet islands of the Cyclades.

The fishing villages

The villages of the wild coast are its heart — clusters of whitewashed and pale-stone houses around a small harbour, a church, a square, and a handful of restaurants where the day’s catch is cooked simply and eaten by the water. They are working places still, or were until recently, and they retain a modesty and a reality that the resort towns lost long ago. To base yourself in one, and to eat and swim and walk from it, is the way to know this coast.

• Choose a smaller northern village over a larger southern resort, and stay put rather than touring.
• Eat the local seafood — the rice dishes, the grilled fish, the stews of the Catalan coast — where the fishermen land it.
• Walk the coastal path to the neighbouring coves and villages, and swim wherever the water tempts you.

The food is a large part of the pleasure. Catalonia is one of the great culinary regions of Europe, and its coast cooks the sea with a simplicity and skill that repays every meal. The rice dishes, the seafood stews, the grilled catch of the day — eaten at a table by the harbour with a bottle of local white — are the taste of the coast itself. The same maritime cooking, in a different key, animates our note on the best Portuguese seafood and marisco.

When to go

The wild Costa Brava is at its best in the shoulder seasons — late spring, when the scrub is in flower and the sea has warmed enough to swim but the crowds have not arrived, and early autumn, when the summer people have gone and the light softens toward gold. High summer brings heat and the day-trippers even to the quieter coves; the edges of the season are when the coast is most itself, the villages quiet, the paths empty, the coves your own.

Avoid July and August if you can, and if you cannot, walk early and swim in the coves the day-trippers do not reach. The wild coast keeps its quiet corners even in high season, for the traveller willing to walk to them. It is a coast that rewards effort and punishes laziness, which is exactly why it has stayed as unspoiled as it has.

The case for the wild coast

The Costa Brava’s reputation is built on its worst stretches, and the traveller who believes the reputation misses one of the Mediterranean’s finest quiet coasts. Look past the resorts to the wild northern shore — the pine-clad cliffs, the turquoise coves, the old fishing villages, the coastal path that links them all — and you find a coast to walk, swim, and eat your way along at the slowest and most rewarding of paces. Go in the shoulder season, base yourself in a small village, and walk the coast cove by cove. For more of the Mediterranean’s quiet corners, the rest of our Travel & Stays writing is the place to wander next.