Girona, 80 kilometres northeast of Barcelona, is touted as one of Catalonia's most atmospheric little cities. Its history seems dominated by seiges by one army or another, the most famous being that in 1809, when the inhabitants held out against 35,000 of Napoleon's troops for seven months, giving up only when their supplies ran out. The modern suburbs are quite extensive, but the old town, situated at the confluence of the rivers Onyar and Ter, is a muddle of narrow streets, steep stairways, little plazas and old stone buildings. We spent part of a day there, in transit from Tarragona to Barcelona, which wasn't really long enough. (It was also the day when museums switched over from their summer to their winter opening times, which meant that many of them closed after lunch and stayed closed for the rest of the day; had we known this earlier, we would have visited the Arab Baths before eating our picnic lunch, and thus not have missed seeing its interior.) We have promised ourselves a full day's revisit to Girona when we make our return visit to Barcelona.

In the few hours available, we raced around furiously trying to see as much of the old town as we could -- and managed quite a lot of it. So we've lots of photographs to show as well -- starting with these two panoramas of the River Onyar. The first shows the approach across the Pont de Sant Feliu to the Church of Sant Feliu and the Catedral; the second is taken from the Pont de Sant Agusti, looking back in the opposite direction. And, yes, those really are trucks parked in the river -- sucking out the drains, we thought, but otherwise far too modern to be of interest.

Having crossed the river, we began our tour. Facing us was the Church of Sant Feliu, constructed from the 14th to the 17th centuries and thus a mixture of Romanesque, Gothic and Baroque styles. And very lop-sided in appearance -- as the picture below left shows, the west front has only one tower. From Sant Feliu, we turned along Calderers, one of the old town's widest streets (below centre), before doubling back to pass through the Portal de Sobreportes (below right), which dates mostly from the 11th century but contains some stonework from the 3rd.

        

The Portal de Sobreportes leads into Placa Catedral, said by the city guides to be one of the most outstanding baroque spaces in Europe. The secular buildings on three sides of the square date from the 18th century; the Catedral, on the fourth side, dates from the 14th century. It was planned with a typical three-aisle nave, but the money ran out once the apse was finished, and for aesthetic and financial reasons the master architect Guillem Bonfill suggested a century later that they be replaced with a single, 22 metre wide great nave. Most of the other architects of the 15th century thought the idea preposterous, but he went ahead anyway. Its western front is approached via a giant stone staircase which runs almost the entire width of the square; below are two views of the west front and the staircase, followed by a view of the square from the top of the stairs; and then two views of other parts of the Catedral, the first of the tower from within the cloisters and the second of the vault of the nave rising above the apse (hidden in this picture by the vegetation).

    

    

The capitals of the columns in the Catedral cloisters are richly carved and worth recording. Here follows a small selection of the many photographs which were taken of them.

        

    

    

Leaving the Catedral via the back way gives access to Girona's Passeig Arqueologic which, like Tarragona's, allows good views of the town walls. We had time only for the section adjacent to the Catedral -- which gives an impression, from the outside, of the size of the mound on which the building sits -- followed by a brief stop in the gardens below the walls before crossing a stream, the Riu Galligants, for a closer look at the 13th century Romanesque Church of Sant Pere Galligans. (The names of the stream and the church are presumably related, but are spelled slightly differently.)

    

    

    

    

It was at this point that we discovered (as mentioned earlier) that the Arab Baths had closed for the day -- although they are not actually Moorish in origin, since the Moors never penetrated as far north as Girona; the building was constructed along Romanesque lines in the 12th-13th centuries, inspired by Muslim models. So off we rushed to see as much of the rest of the old town as we could, striking off down Carrer de la Forca, the main thoroughfare of the medieval period, which (before their expulsion from Spain in 1492) also ran through the the Jewish district, Call Jueu. This led us on into Carrer de l'Argenteria, a typical street from the time of the medieval guilds, and thence into Rambla de la Llibertat, Girona's main shopping district. (This being the lunch period, most places were closed. Not that we had time for shopping anyway....)

    

    

    

    

After that, it was down to rushing around photographing everything that looked interesting -- the facades of buildings, church porticoes, narrow streets, and the steps which replace the road surface on the old town's steeper hills. A selection of these pictures follows. The second photograph in the second row shows the street named Pujada Sant Domenec; the second photograph in the third row shows the portico of the Church of Sant Mart Sacosta (a church so hemmed in by other buildings that a clear view of it is impossible); and the last two photographs show a curious stone balcony for a vanished window or door, and a view of the solitary tower of the Church of Sant Feliu from Pujada Sant Feliu -- thus returning us to almost where we began.