Besalú: the Bridge, the Jewish Quarter and the MonasteryAudio Guide to Besalú

About this tour

Besalú is the town where Disney has filmed scenes for its movies, and where the series Westworld turned the medieval square into an Italian village occupied by the Nazis. But what you will really take away from here never made it onto any screen. You are going to hear the story of a Jewish ritual bath that lay buried for almost 500 years, until in 1964 a neighbour digging a well ran straight into it by pure chance, and you will know exactly how to visit it if you fancy going down its 36 steps. You are going to stand in front of the best preserved Romanesque civic house in all of Catalonia, with a courtyard that was already filling with light in the 12th century, when the normal thing was to live in a dark tower. And you are going to cross the same bridge that the documents record from the year 1075, the one that has been dynamited, pulled down and raised again three times. At its peak, one in every four people in Besalú was Jewish. Their community, their streets, their school and their synagogue are the thread running through the whole walk. I tell it to you myself, in my own voice, stop by stop. Ten places, about an hour, one kilometre at an unhurried pace. We start where you park, with the fortified bridge right in front of you.

Route10 stops