INTRODUCTION The most unfairly maligned and misrepresented stretch of coast in Europe, the Costa Brava has long been derided as a package-holiday, chips-and-sangria destination – an image that is based solely on two or three of the more notorious towns at its southernmost tip. The truth is that this diverse region matches extraordinary natural beauty with a rich cultural heritage, an accumulated legacy of centuries of invading armies that shows itself in a tapestry of walled towns, fortified farmhouses and ancient hilltop villages. The coastline is enchantingly serpentine – Costa Brava means "Rugged Coast" – with spurs of the Pyrenees forming wild sea-cliffs. Secluded coves hide between the jagged rocks, where tenacious pines cover the slopes down to the water’s edge and extensive sandy beaches provide a breathing space, punctuating the deeply scored shoreline.
In the 1900s, Picasso and Marc Chagall were drawn to the area’s beauty, and when Salvador Dalí returned to his childhood home here, artists, writers and would-be bohemians trailed in his wake; before the Civil War struck, the Costa Brava had begun to compete with France’s Côte d’Azur as a playground for the rich and famous. When Franco’s Ministry of Tourism began pushing the area as a holiday destination in the 1950s, with scant regard for regional sensibilities or the environment, the jetset initially returned, but as sedate fishing towns were devoured and distorted by high-rise hotels, they turned their noses up at the tide of package tourists and moved on.
However, the region’s charm had always survived alongside the depredations of the tourist boom, and the locals had long known where to come to see the best of their stunning coastline. When democracy returned in the 1970s, so did a Catalan sense of self: these days, the towns of the Costa Brava are increasingly unwilling to sell their soul for tourism. The idealized, emasculated caricature of a pan-Spanish culture that was dreamt up by the impoverished Franco regime, complete with sanitized and wholly alien images of flamenco and bull-fighting, has all but disappeared. In its place, the region is restating and strengthening native values for a more discerning breed of visitor, and the Costa Brava has begun to overturn its largely undeserved foreign reputation as the repository of all that’s worst in mass tourism.