From the shallow Juliet balcony of our apartment in old Girona, rhythmic drums rose from the plaza below. Then horns. A crowd assembled.
We had planned to be in Girona. We had not planned for this. But then, Spain has a way of offering its festivals to the unsuspecting — we had stumbled into the Day of the Valencian Community on an earlier trip without knowing what it was until we were already in the middle of it. Here we were again, arriving to find a city already in motion, and entirely willing to be swept along.
We were in Spain in June 2021 — our oldest son Caden had just graduated from high school, the world still navigating its way out of two years of pandemic, and the boys were playing in a football (soccer) tournament along the Costa Brava.
Their schedule gave us three independent nights in Girona while they trained nearby, and we had taken an apartment just off Plaça del Vi in what appeared to have once been a private villa: stone pointed arches with iron bars surrounded a carved stairwell beneath a coffered wood ceiling in the central entrance hall. Medieval bones under a residential skin. We arrived with research rather than familiarity — a city I had read about but not yet walked, about to reveal itself considerably more than anticipated.
The arrival itself had been instructive. Girona’s Barri Vell — the old city — is a labyrinth of narrow one-way streets connected by archways that pass beneath buildings, the spatial logic of a medieval settlement that organized itself around defense and adjacency, not cars.
Attempting to navigate it with our rental car so we could unload, I turned down what appeared to be a sloped street only to discover, as the car began to bump in a particular rhythm, that the slope had graduated into shallow stone steps. I managed to reverse out at an angle, with only minimal damage to my dignity. After that, the car stayed in a lot on the other side of the river.
Girona on Foot
On foot Girona becomes entirely different — comprehensible, beautiful, and layered in the way of cities that have been continuously inhabited since the Romans. The Rambla de la Llibertat, a pedestrian boulevard running parallel to the Onyar, offered our first proper orientation: plane trees overhead, café tables along historic medieval arcades sheltering local boutiques, the stone facades of the old city rising directly above.
We walked to the red iron bridge — El Pont de les Peixateries Velles, the open-truss footbridge built by Gustave Eiffel’s company just before he built the tower in Paris — the cathedral and basilica visible beyond the wall of colorful facades lining the river.
Returning to La Tagliatella just a few doors down from our apartment, our first dinner was even better than the restaurant revealed: a caprese-inspired salad of greens topped with juicy sun-dried tomatoes, burrata, basil sorbetto and pearls — clean and unexpected — followed by a decadent mushroom and foie gras pizza topped with raspberry pearls.
Back across that red iron bridge, Plaça de la Independència for the first time — lit and lively under its colonnaded arcades, the kind of plaza that makes everything else feel like threshold. We returned to that plaza in the daytime and again on the night of Sant Joan. Between those visits, we learned the city.
One afternoon we drove to Palamós — where the boys were training before moving to Lloret de Mar for their tournament — arriving with time before a session to explore the town.
A small open-air spot next to the beach introduced us, for the first time, to la hora de vermut — the vermouth hour, the Spanish mid-morning or pre-lunch ritual of a glass of red vermouth often served with a side of olives, a moment of deliberate pause before the appetite fully opens. Americans tend to know vermouth as the dry, barely-there addition to a martini — not the rich, bitter-sweet, very drinkable Spanish version served over ice with a slice of orange. It was the first of many.
That evening at l’Estrella del Mar, its glass case displaying the day’s catch, we had fresh scallops, a small seafood paella, and a fideuà — the pasta equivalent of paella, the short noodles absorbing the same saffron-and-seafood depth. The Costa Brava produces food that tastes of the sea in the most direct possible way.
Another day we had pintxos at Zanpanzar — the Basque tapas bars that appear throughout Catalonia, their counters of small bites on bread a different Spanish tradition from the south — mine with a vermut rojo, which was by then becoming a pattern.
Our favorite hours in Girona were the ones spent on foot through the layers of the old city. Climbing the stairs to Sant Martí, through the narrow corridors of El Call — the Jewish quarter, one of the best-preserved medieval Jewish neighborhoods in Europe, its narrow lanes and hidden courtyards dating from the 9th century — into the Arab Baths, Els Banys Àrabs, the 12th-century Romanesque bathhouse whose pools and columns have survived largely intact.
Then through the Passeig Arqueòlogic to the formal gardens along the old city walls, and along the walls themselves for panoramic views above the cathedral, the university, and the rooftops of the city below. This is what Girona rewards the walker with — not a single monument but a continuous sequence of eras, each one still inhabitable.
The Night of Fire
We had no idea La Nit de Sant Joan was happening when we stepped onto the balcony that evening.
Drawn by the drums and the growing noise from Plaça del Vi just below, we went down to join the crowd — daylight still fully present, dusk still two hours off, the night ahead longer than it had any right to be. Townspeople of all ages had assembled — many wearing yellow in a common show of Catalan solidarity, faces still masked in the pandemic-cautious summer of 2021 — gathered around a stage where a man repeatedly proclaimed, “Foc!” to enthusiastic response.
The crowd’s appetite for foc appeared inexhaustible. Between a giant costumed medieval king and queen and a gilt-crowned chicken, a fire blower made his way around the plaza. Each time fire spewed from his mouth the crowd roared its approval — apparently cured and cleansed by the experience, ready to proclaim their need for more foc all over again. It had sounded like some sort of hedonistic ritual to our American ears. As it turned out, it was — just one with very old roots.
Foc means fire in Catalan — Catalonia’s regional language, distinct from Spanish, the language of daily life in this part of Spain. And fire is precisely what this night is about.
La Nit de Sant Joan — the Night of Saint John the Baptist — is the celebration of the summer solstice, the shortest night of the year, when the sun reaches its zenith and summer begins with a celebratory bang. Since ancient times, fire has carried the symbolism of abundance, purity, fertility, and renewal: the burning away of what is old to allow what is new. An ancient European tradition, pre-Christian in its roots, that the Catholic calendar absorbed and gave a saint’s name.
Those pre-Christian roots run deeper than the fire. Herbs with restorative properties are important to this night — thyme, rosemary, and particularly verbena, the plant that gives the celebration one of its alternate names, Revetlla de Sant Joan. Verbena was once offered to pagan gods and is still thought to be an aphrodisiac. Perhaps this night was always meant to be a little seductive after all.
The flame at the heart of it all begins high in the Pyrenees. A lantern has been burning on the mountain of Canigó since 1955 — the same flame, passed forward. On the evening of June 22, hikers climb Canigó and light a bonfire from it. At dawn on the 23rd, la Flama del Canigó — the Canigó Flame — travels by torch in the hands of volunteers from the Pyrenees peak in Perpignan across the border into Catalonia, lighting bonfires called fogueres in every city along its path: Girona, Barcelona, and dozens of towns in between.
The flame unites the Catalan people on both sides of the French-Spanish border — a living connection across a boundary that history drew through a culture that existed before it.
The open-air celebrations that follow — revetlles in Catalan, verbenas in Spanish — last through the night. Parties in each neighborhood begin in early evening with feasts, fireworks, bonfires, and music. The next day, June 24, is a public holiday. It would have to be.
The Night Unfolds
The sun didn’t set over the River Onyar until after nine, casting a long creamy light on the old city walls well into the evening. As the daylight finally dimmed, cracks of fireworks began from across the bridge.
There was no central fireworks display directing the crowd to a designated viewing point — just individuals of their own accord, kids and adults, creating their own spectacles in the squares and streets. We simply walked, from one plaza to another, over the cobblestones, through the archways. Shops were closed; the streets were alive and convivial.
As visitors we were spectators, never joining — just observing a father with his children, pairs of sweethearts, groups of friends moving through the same night. And yet we felt part of the energy of it, the way public celebrations in a city include everyone present by proximity.
The restaurant umbrella vibe drew us to Plaça de la Independència, where families and friends had gathered at tables in the lit colonnaded square. Traditionally, the night calls for cava and la coca de Sant Joan — sweet brioche cakes, classically anise-flavored with candied fruit and pine nuts.
We were still full from the pintxos bar, so we settled on a bench with glasses of Valencian horchata made with chufas, tiger nut tubers, and watched the kids set off firecrackers in front of the plaza’s monument: a sculpture created in 1894 dedicated to the defenders of Girona during the Napoleonic invasions of 1808–1809 — a different kind of Catalan memory, an older one, embedded in the same plaza where this summer’s celebration was now underway.
We crossed the Eiffel bridge in the darkness. A dim, orange flicker replaced the warmer glow that had emanated from the cathedral tower on previous evenings — the old light burned away to allow a fresh start. Pyrotechnics continued into the black sky above.
Walking back through the labyrinth of streets to our apartment, we climbed the carved stairwell, opened the French doors, and stepped onto the narrow balcony. Music still played. Firecrackers still popped. The plaza below was still busy. This, we understood, was not a night meant for sleeping.
On Catalan Pride
Standing in that plaza, watching a city celebrate its own identity with fire and music and the language that marks its distinctness from the country that contains it, we thought about what this night represented beyond the summer solstice.
We had first encountered Catalan pride in a very different register — in Barcelona in October 2019, the day nine Catalan independence leaders were sentenced to prison terms of up to thirteen years. We had arrived by train into a city in the middle of its own crisis: the airport shut down, streets barricaded, demonstrations growing nightly from peaceful chanting to fires and broken glass. The same flags, the same language, the same fierce sense of a culture insisting on being seen — expressed then in grief and anger. Now, twenty months later in Girona, that same identity was being celebrated with fire and music and a city awake until dawn. Two expressions of the same thing.
Catalonia has its own language, its own traditions, its own flag — the senyera, four red stripes on gold — and a fierce sense of heritage that has survived repeated attempts across history to diminish or erase it. Spain is Catalonia’s guardian, its larger context, its governing framework. But every subculture contained within a larger national whole carries the same fundamental wish: to be seen and heard, to be championed as equal rather than absorbed. The night of Sant Joan — with its flame carried across a border that divides a culture the border didn’t create — is one way a people keeps itself legible to itself.
We had arrived in Girona knowing none of this firsthand. Three days later, and two years after Barcelona, we understood a little more.
For the full story of arriving into Barcelona during the 2019 independence protests, read Barcelona: Spain or Catalonia? →
Girona connects to the Iberia Atlas → Catalonia and the Festivals + Celebrations cultural thread. Read about Barcelona and the complexity of Catalan identity →
Your writing is light, fun, and informative.
Thank you. Glad you enjoyed it!