There had been cocktails. That’s the context.
Not a huge amount — enough. The kind of evening that ends well and starts the next morning with the quiet acknowledgement that you are going out anyway, because that’s what you do, and the heat is already building at ten to ten and Strava has a route and you are going to trust it.
La Devesa. Plane trees, long avenue, dappled shade. The finish line you didn’t know you needed.
Domeny
The route headed east out of the city centre, away from the tourist end entirely. Past the ivy-covered railway viaduct — completely engulfed, barely a bridge anymore, just a wall of green — and then off the tarmac onto dirt tracks. Stone walls. Old farmhouses half-buried in vegetation. A path that felt like it had nothing to do with a city of a hundred thousand people, and yet was technically inside one.
This is what Girona does quietly. You don’t have to go far before the urban fabric just stops, and something older and more rural takes over. I made a note to come back and go further. There was clearly more out there.
Ivy viaduct on the way out. The city quietly disappearing behind green.
Dirt track, Domeny direction. Stone farmhouse. Nobody around.
The detour
Coming back in I adjusted the route — Strava had a line, I had a different idea. Ducked down under the iron bridge to find what was underneath: a concrete apron at the water’s edge, graffiti covering the support pillar in colour, the river green and slow beyond. One of those spots that only exists if you go looking for it.
Then up and east again, into the back streets of the old quarter. Empty. Hot. The kind of quiet that a medieval street produces at mid-morning on a summer Sunday — shutters closed, no one in a hurry, cobbles going wherever they want to go.
Under the iron bridge. Graffiti pillar, concrete apron, river beyond.
Old town street. Nobody there. Morning heat on pale stone.
Torre Gironella
This was the moment that stopped the run.
I came up through a garden I hadn’t expected to find and there it was — the Gironella tower, a medieval defensive keep, rising out of the greenery with a bench in front of it and not a single other person in sight. The gardens run along the inside of the old city walls, terraced and shaded, cypresses above, the cathedral visible from different angles as you move through. The Pont del Batlle — a single-arch stone bridge, completely hidden in the undergrowth — crossed a tiny stream you’d never know was there.
I took photos. I stopped moving. I made a mental note that Sarah needed to see this.
Torre Gironella. Medieval defensive tower. Garden below. Nobody there.
Pont del Batlle. Stone arch, overgrown, completely hidden. A bridge that exists for itself.
Cathedral of Girona from the gardens below. Cypresses doing their work.
La Devesa
The park was the finish. After the heat and the climbing and the old stone, the Devesa opened out into a long avenue of plane trees — enormous, evenly spaced, canopies meeting overhead — and the shade was immediate and total and felt like something had been switched off. A few people walking dogs. Nobody running except me. The light coming through the leaves in patches.
I slowed down. Not much, but a little. You would.
The painted doors on the descent. Saxophone. Sunset. 1906. Not planned.
The saxophone doors came just before — an archway somewhere in the old quarter, double doors painted floor to ceiling with a jazz bar scene, vivid and completely unexpected. Some cities hide their best things where the route changes.
The Devesa avenue. Plane trees. Shade. The point where the run became something else.
The hangover had more or less dissolved by the time I got back. Five and a half miles, 293 feet of climbing, 9:41 pace. In that heat, with that context, I’ll take it.
I went back to the hotel and told Sarah about the tower and the gardens.
She came the next day.
Girona, Catalonia — 5.40 miles — 52m 19s — 293ft elevation — 9:41 /mi
