You are thinking about a day trip from Barcelona and wondering whether Girona really deserves the day, or whether it is just another pretty town to photograph from the bridge before moving on?
Let me answer straight away: it deserves it, and not because of the colourful houses. Those are the postcard, and the postcard is lovely. But inside the walls there is a cathedral with the widest Gothic nave in the world, an eleventh-century embroidery that is one of the most extraordinary medieval objects in Europe, and a Jewish quarter among the best preserved on the continent. All within a ten-minute walk.
The old town is called the Barri Vell and it is tiny: you can see it properly in a single day, as long as you know what to look for and in what order to move.
Shall we plan it properly?
Off we go!
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The Barri Vell: a town you can cross in twenty minutes
The first thing to understand about Girona is its shape. The old town sits on the flank of a hill, squeezed between the river Onyar and the walls, and it is made of staircases. Not streets with the odd step: proper stone staircases, steep, climbing towards the cathedral and dropping back down to the river.
That has two practical consequences. The first is that you need serious shoes, because in a day of ups and downs you will climb plenty. The second, much nicer, is that Girona is not seen, it is discovered in fragments, one lane at a time, and every corner takes the view away and gives it back.
Where is it best to start?
At the bottom, by the river, and then climb. The other way round you would be walking the best part downhill, and a cathedral that appears in front of you at the top of ninety steps is one of those things worth earning.
Girona Cathedral and the widest Gothic nave in the world
Girona Cathedral announces itself from a distance with its Baroque staircase: ninety steps and three landings, built in the seventeenth century along with the façade. It is the most theatrical setting in town, and it is the reason the producers of Game of Thrones chose it for the Great Sept of Baelor in season six.
Then you go in, and the real thing happens.
Because behind that Baroque façade there is a single nave 22.98 metres wide: the widest ever built in Gothic style, and the second widest in the world after St Peter’s. Thirty-four metres high, and not a single column in the middle. Not one.
And how was that decided?
By something close to a technical referendum. Between 1416 and 1417 the chapter summoned the twelve most authoritative master builders of Catalonia and Mallorca to answer a question that was also a gamble: carry on with three naves, as the church had been started, or go for one enormous span? Most of the experts said no, it was too risky. The chapter took the risk anyway, backing the architect Guillem Bofill, and the single nave was built.
The result is a space that resembles no other Gothic cathedral in Europe. Where at Chartres or Amiens the eye runs along rows of piers, here it has nothing to hold on to: just an enormous sideways void that hits you all at once.
One curiosity: that façade stayed an open building site for more than three and a half centuries. The first stone was laid in 1606, work then stopped and only resumed in 1680, and the job was declared finished in 1960, with the last sculptures put in place over the following two years. For roughly ten generations the people of Girona climbed those ninety steps towards a half-finished front.
The Tapestry of Creation: the piece that is worth the ticket on its own
Inside the cathedral museum, at the end of the Treasury rooms, is the object that justifies coming to Girona even for a single hour.
The Tapís de la Creació, the Tapestry of Creation, is not a tapestry at all: it is an embroidery, worked with a needle on a woollen ground, roughly four and a half metres by three and a half. It dates from the late eleventh or early twelfth century, and it has reached us with its colours almost intact, which for a nine-hundred-year-old textile is close to a miracle.
At the centre is Christ Pantocrator, inside a circle, and around him run the scenes from the first chapters of Genesis: the separation of light from darkness, the creation of the birds and the fish, Adam naming the animals, the creation of Eve. In the corners, four winged figures blow: they are the winds. The lower band shows the months of the year and the labours of the fields.
But why does it matter so much?
Because it is an encyclopaedia. It does not just tell a sacred story: it puts cosmic time and farming time, the sky and the calendar, into one circular scheme. It is how an eleventh-century mind pictured the whole universe, in thread.
A detail you may not know: the first written mention of the Tapís dates from the sixteenth century, when Charles V, passing through Girona, specifically asked to see it. Even then it was the thing you showed important guests. Since 1975 it has had a room of its own, with the low light needed to protect it.
The Romanesque cloister and its capitals
Before you leave, do not skip the cloister. It is twelfth-century, so far older than the Gothic nave, and it is one of the finest in Catalonia for a curious reason: it is not square but trapezoidal, because it had to fit the shape of the ground and the Carolingian walls running alongside it.
The capitals and the friezes above the little columns are an illustrated book. You will find Genesis, working scenes, animals, monsters, and figures of men caught in everyday gestures: one pulling, one pushing, one carrying a weight. Romanesque art is full of this modest humanity, which sits alongside the symbolic order without contradicting it.
Take the time to walk the full circuit slowly, looking at the capitals one by one. It is the quietest place in Girona, and in the middle of the day you often have it almost to yourself.
The Call: one of the best-preserved Jewish quarters in Europe
From the cathedral you walk down Carrer de la Força, which follows the line of the old Roman road, and you enter the Call: Girona’s Jewish quarter.
The community settled here in the ninth century and for four hundred years was one of the most important in the peninsula. In the thirteenth century Girona was a centre of Kabbalistic study of European standing, and the figure who made it so was Nahmanides, Moses ben Nahman, whom the Catalans call Bonastruc ça Porta: rabbi, physician, philosopher, and one of the great medieval commentators on the Torah.
Then came the end. Persecution grew harsher through the fifteenth century and the expulsion decree of 1492 closed the community’s story. The houses were walled up, the lanes sealed, and paradoxically that is exactly why the Call survives so well: nobody built over it.
What is there to visit, concretely?
The Museu d’Història dels Jueus, at Carrer de la Força 8, housed in what was the last synagogue building. Eleven rooms, but the one you will remember is the room of Hebrew funerary stones, recovered from Girona’s Montjuïc cemetery. They are bare slabs with the names still legible, and they say more than any panel.
The rest of the Call you visit on foot, for free: very narrow lanes, courtyards, covered passages the sun never reaches. Get lost there on purpose.
Sant Feliu, the Banys Àrabs and Sant Pere de Galligants
Below the cathedral, just through the Portal de Sobreportes (which stands exactly where the northern gate of the Roman town once opened), is the basilica of Sant Feliu, the most local church in Girona: the one where the people of the city actually go.
Look at the bell tower: the base is fourteenth-century, contracted in 1368 to master Pere Sacoma and finished in 1392, while the upper section went up between 1532 and 1581. Now look at the central spire: it is truncated. That is not an unfinished design, it is an accident. Lightning struck and beheaded it, and it has stayed that way ever since, closed off by a terrace and surrounded by the surviving side spires. It is the silhouette by which you recognise Girona from anywhere in the valley.
Inside, set into the walls of the Gothic presbytery, are eight sarcophagi: two with pagan Roman subjects and six early Christian, the most important set of its kind preserved in the whole Iberian peninsula. One shows the rape of Proserpina. They were already ancient when the church was built, and the builders put them on display like trophies: you see only the front, the rest is inside the wall.
A few metres away are the Banys Àrabs, and here a point almost nobody makes: they are not Arab. They are a late twelfth-century Romanesque building (the first mention of public baths in Girona dates from 1194), put up by Christians on the model of Islamic and Roman baths. The cold room, with its pool ringed by slender columns and the octagonal lantern letting light down from above, is one of the most photogenic spaces in town.
A little further on, beyond the Galligants stream, the Benedictine monastery of Sant Pere de Galligants is a masterpiece of Catalan Romanesque and now houses the Girona branch of the Museu d’Arqueologia de Catalunya. Here too the cloister capitals are worth the visit on their own.
The Onyar houses and Eiffel’s bridge
Now the postcard, which you have earned.
The cases de l’Onyar are the houses hanging over the river, built between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries and painted ochre, red, yellow and green. The colours are neither random nor ancient: today’s range comes from the 1982-83 rehabilitation project by the architects Josep Fuses and Joan Maria Viader, with the palette worked out by the Girona artists Enric Ansesa and Jaume Faixó to give unity to façades that had turned into a patchwork.
The place to look at them from is the Pont de les Peixateries Velles, the red iron bridge across the Onyar. It was built in 1877 by Gustave Eiffel’s firm, twelve years before the Paris tower, and it is a riveted lattice structure in a loud red. Walk across it, then stop on the next bridge along to photograph it together with the houses.
A detail: when the river is still, and at sunset it often is, the reflection doubles the façades exactly. That is why the picture of Girona you have already seen always looks mirrored.
On the bank, at Carrer de les Ballesteries 29, is Casa Masó: the birthplace of Rafael Masó (1880-1935), the great architect of Catalan noucentisme, and the only one of the Onyar houses you can visit inside. Entry is by guided tour and booking only, so write or call ahead.
The wall walk: the right place for sunset
If you have only one hour to spend well, spend it here.
The Passeig de la Muralla runs along the top of the city walls, with stretches going back to Roman times and to the Carolingian rebuilding of the ninth century: it is one of the longest surviving Carolingian wall circuits in Europe. You can get up from several points in the Barri Vell, access is free, and the full route takes a good half hour, towers included.
From up there you finally understand the plan of the town: the tiled roofs all at the same height, the truncated bell tower of Sant Feliu rising in the middle, the bulk of the cathedral behind and, beyond, the hills. Halfway along are the Jardins dels Alemanys, gardens grown inside the ruins of an eighteenth-century Spanish barracks, with trees coming out of the windows.
Go an hour before sunset: the stone catches fire and the old town goes from grey to gold in about twenty minutes.
Practical information
Getting there. Girona is a very easy day trip from Barcelona: on the high-speed line from Barcelona Sants it takes about 40 minutes. The regional train (line R11) is cheaper but takes roughly an hour and a half. The station is a ten-minute walk from the Barri Vell, on the other bank of the Onyar.
Cathedral. Open 10.00 to 19.30 in July and August, 10.00 to 17.30 from November to March, 10.00 to 18.30 the rest of the year. Ticket 7 euros with audio guide included, 5 reduced, free for Girona residents. There is a combined ticket for the cathedral, Sant Feliu and the Museu d’Art at 12 euros, worth it if you plan to see all three.
Museu d’Història dels Jueus. Carrer de la Força 8. Admission 4 euros, 2 reduced, free on the first Sunday of the month. In July and August Monday to Saturday 10.00-19.00, Sunday and public holidays 10.00-14.00; from September to June Tuesday to Saturday 10.00-18.00, while Monday, Sunday and public holidays stop at 14.00.
Banys Àrabs. Monday to Saturday 10.00-18.00, Sunday and public holidays 10.00-14.00. Admission 3 euros, 2 for over-65s, 1 for students and large families.
Hours and prices in this section checked in August 2026 on the official sites of the four monuments.
Museu d’Arqueologia (Sant Pere de Galligants). Tuesday to Saturday 10.00-19.00 from May to September, 10.00-18.00 from October to April; Sunday and public holidays 10.00-14.00. Closed on Mondays. Free on the first Sunday of the month.
When to go. The week to mark in the calendar is Girona, Temps de Flors, in May: for nine days courtyards, staircases and cloisters that are normally closed open to the public filled with floral installations. It is beautiful and it is also when the town is fullest: if you are after quiet, avoid it.
Two honest warnings. First: almost everything is uphill, and worn stone steps get slippery in the rain. Second: in the warm months the day-trip groups from Barcelona arrive around eleven and leave around five, so early morning and late afternoon are a different town.
And if you want to understand more? Girona is small but layered, and the difference between seeing it and understanding it comes down to someone explaining who the Kabbalists of the Call were and why that nave is a gamble. You can book a walking tour of the old town with the monument tickets included and check the available times.
Before you go: the cul de la lleona
There is one last thing to do, and it is a small piece of silliness the people of Girona care about enormously.
At the foot of the Sant Feliu steps stands a column with a stone lioness climbing up it. The original is twelfth-century and is kept at the Museu d’Art; the one in the street is a copy. Tradition says that whoever kisses her backside will come back to Girona, and that nobody can truly call themselves a local without having done it.
You need a small ladder, there is usually a queue, and it is the most ridiculous photograph you will bring home from Catalonia.
Want to carry on travelling in Spain? All our guides are gathered on the page devoted to Spain, and if you head down to the capital I would start with the 9 works to see at the Reina Sofia Museum.
