A Guide to Empordà, the Artistic Hot Spot of Spain's Costa Brava

Condé Nast Traveler

3 hours ago

Spain's Costa Brava has long been a magnet for the jet set, its pebbled calas and charming fishing villages luring everyone from Truman Capote and Marcel Duchamp to Ava Gardner. While you could easily follow in their footsteps, spending your vacation hopping from one rocky playa to the next, that would mean missing out on the wider charms of Empordà, the storied region stretching inland from the Mediterranean Sea and north toward the French border.
Once home to the first Greek settlement on the Iberian Peninsula, this picturesque corner of Spain, just an hour and a half north of Barcelona, encompasses a patchwork of honey-hued medieval towns, vineyard-blanketed hills, and rocky landscapes shaped by the fierce Tramuntana wind—which is said to have inspired the creative genius of the region's most famous son, Salvador Dalí.
But Empordà's pastoral beauty and agricultural soul shouldn't distract from its more contemporary draws: a red-hot arts scene, detour-worthy dining, and an explosion of new design-forward hotels, including Finca Victoria, Villa Salvador, and a new property launched by the brothers behind the region's three-Michelin-starred El Celler de Can Roca. 'Amazingly, Empordà still feels under-the-radar,' says Pau Guardans, founder of Único Hotels, whose jewel-box retreat Mas de Torrent is the preferred bolthole of Barcelona's elite (complete with a helipad and museum-worthy art collection).
But with more travelers venturing beyond the well-trodden trail, Empordà is quickly shedding its locals-only reputation and emerging as one of Spain's hotspots. It's a place where an itinerary might include cycling between perfectly preserved 15th-century villages, birdwatching in the Aiguamolls wetlands, wine-tasting at family-run bodegas, and tapping into the region's creative side at ceramic studios and independent art galleries.