Costa Brava

Where it sits. The Costa Brava is the Catalan coastline of the province of Girona, running roughly two hundred kilometres from Blanes, about sixty kilometres north-east of Barcelona, to Portbou on the French border. The name was coined in 1908 by the journalist Ferran Agulló and means rugged coast, which is an accurate piece of branding: where the Costa Daurada to the south is long sandy beach, here the Catalan coastal range and the eastern Pyrenees come down to the water in granite and schist, producing headlands of red-brown rock, umbrella pines growing to the tideline, and hundreds of small coves reachable only on foot or by boat. The sea is clear, cold in spring, and deep close inshore.

A coast of separate places. There is no single Costa Brava, and treating it as one resort is the standard visitor error. The southern end around Lloret de Mar and Blanes has been mass-market since the 1960s and looks it. North of that, Tossa de Mar keeps the Vila Vella, a walled medieval town of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries standing on its headland above the beach, the only fortified coastal town of its date left in Catalonia. The middle section around Palafrugell holds the string of former fishing villages, Calella, Llafranc and Tamariu, that people mean when they talk about the coast at its best: whitewashed arcades on the seafront, small crescent beaches, and the Sant Sebastià lighthouse above them. Further north, Empúries preserves the Greek and Roman city where Hellenic traders landed in the sixth century BC, and beyond the Gulf of Roses the Cap de Creus peninsula turns into a wind-flayed natural park of contorted schist, with Cadaqués and Salvador Dalí's house at Portlligat in a bay behind it.

On screen. The coast's oldest film association belongs to Tossa de Mar, where Pandora and the Flying Dutchman was shot in 1950 with Ava Gardner and James Mason; a bronze statue of Gardner now looks out from the walls of the Vila Vella, and the production is generally credited with beginning the coast's international tourism. Six decades later the Costa Brava supplied the emotional turning point of one of the most-watched Indian films of its generation. In Zoya Akhtar's Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011), the second of the three friends' challenges is a deep dive, and the scuba sequence in which the character played by Hrithik Roshan confronts a lifelong fear of water was shot off this coast. It is the quietest passage in a loud film and the one Indian viewers most often name, and it turned diving on the Costa Brava into a recognised item on the Indian travel itinerary through Spain.

Diving, walking and the Medes. The coast has a genuine claim as the best diving on the Spanish Mediterranean, and it rests on the Illes Medes, seven small limestone islets a kilometre off L'Estartit that have been a strict marine reserve since the 1980s. Protection from fishing has restored dense populations of dusky grouper, barracuda and conger, and the islets are riddled with tunnels, arches and caves at diveable depths, with visibility often above twenty metres. On land, the Camí de Ronda is the great walk: a path originally cut for coastguards watching for smugglers, it threads along the cliff edge linking cove to cove, dropping to sea level and climbing again, and stretches of it around Begur, Palafrugell and Sant Feliu de Guíxols make superb half-day sections. Boat services along the coast in summer let you walk one way and return by sea.

Food and the interior. The Empordà behind the coast is one of the strongest food regions in Spain, and the cooking is a distinct tradition rather than generic Mediterranean: anchovies cured at L'Escala, prawns from Palamós landed and auctioned at the port each afternoon, rice dishes, and the mar i muntanya combinations of seafood with meat. The region produced the restaurant elBulli at Cala Montjoi near Roses, which closed in 2011, and the influence of that kitchen still runs through the area. Inland lie the medieval villages of Pals, Peratallada and Monells, and the Empordà wine denomination on stony ground behind Figueres.

Getting there and timing. Girona airport sits in the middle of the coast, and Barcelona is under two hours away by road; trains reach Girona, Figueres and Blanes, with buses onward to the villages, though a car makes the coves far easier. July and August are hot and full, with Barcelona weekenders on top of foreign visitors. June and September give sea temperatures around twenty-two degrees with far fewer people, and May and October are the walkers' months, when the tramuntana wind is at its cleanest and the path is empty.