El Port de la Selva

One year ago today, my wife and I awoke in a two-star, beachfront hotel in the slightly shabby town of St. Pierre-sur-Mer, having arrived there from Barcelona, where we’d enjoyed a delightful weekend, and from where we’d set out on a mapless, and consequently rather aimless day’s cross-border drive. Between us, we’d concocted a composite mental image of a place combining maritime quaintness and salubriousness, and, not having discovered this ideal in France, we headed back Spainward, stopping first in Narbonne to buy some roadmaps.

We followed the toll-roads back as far as Figueres, and from there we headed for the Cap de Creus, which I’d gathered was a picturesque area. Our first port of call there was Llança, where we failed find a hotel that quite matched what we had in mind. Looking at the map, I thought we could try following the coast road to the resort town of Roses, but, before we got that far, we happened upon El Port de la Selva…

Here we found the Hotel Porto Cristo, which was to be our base for the next three days, a very comfortable three-star place with particularly warm and welcoming staff. As the sun smiled on us but fleetingly, we weren’t much tempted to loll on the nearby beach but instead lazed in the hotelroom a good deal, heading out for the occasional excursion, to the nearby Gulf of Roses, and to the Teatro-Museo Salvador Dalí in Figueres.

We enjoyed a couple of good meals at the Porto Cristo’s restaurant, a high-ceilinged, stone-walled place, whose waiters we came to think of as ‘Penn & Teller’— one big, tall, and garrulous, the other diminutive and almost silent. ‘Penn’ was a most helpful and hospitable chap, translating items on the menu, recommending local wines and plying us with after-dinner drinks after we’d dispensed with our portions of Crema Catalana. The only word we heard ‘Teller’ utter, on the other hand, was, on the evening before our departure: Adios.

Posted by misteraitch at July 2, 2003 03:01 PM