DAY TOUR, BARCELONA: DAY TRIP: CADAQUES & GIRONA

This 10-hour day trip from the city of Barcelona leads you through two Catalan dreamscapes – the ancient city so well-preserved that it recently stood in for the fantasy world of TV’s Game of Thrones, and the quaint, whitewashed fishing village that inspired surrealist master painter Salvador Dalí. 

In Girona you’ll walk Medieval lanes, walls, and watchtowers where three rivers converge on a point so strategic that the armies of the past were forever laying siege. Explore the richly atmospheric labyrinth of the Jewish Quarter, the Gothic Cathedral with its gold and silver-flecked interior, and the spiralled, sepulchral basilica of Sant Feliu. And the Museu d’Art will give you a primer on Catalan painting before your private guide and driver bring you onward to Cadaqués, former residence of the great Dalí. Stroll around the bay that the groundbreaking artist often drew on in his work, studying it through the warped picture windows of the house where he lived for half a century. That dream home, spliced together from a cluster of fishing cottages, is now the Portlligat Museum, where you can lose yourself amid trick-mirrors, stuffed swans, and phallic pools, as if wandering through Dalí’s own imagination.