Palafrugell

About Palafrugell

Palafrugell is the most populated municipality of the Baix Empordà, with 24,543 people on the register at 1 January 2025, and it is really several places at once. The town itself sits inland, in the corridor where the Empordà plain runs out at the sea; the coast belongs to it too — Calella de Palafrugell, Llafranc and Tamariu, three coves along about 12 km of cliff path — along with the village of Llofriu under the Gavarres hills and the hamlets of Santa Margarida and Ermedàs. At the height of August the municipality holds something closer to 60,000 people, roughly triple the registered figure, and then empties again.

The oldest thing here is the headland. An Iberian settlement stood on Sant Sebastià, 165 m above the sea, from the 6th century BC; the Romans moved down to Llafranc, which shipped wine and pottery until the 4th century AD. The name Palafrugell — palau, a fortified house, plus a Germanic personal name — first appears in a deed of 988 in the archive of Girona Cathedral, and the church of Sant Martí was raised between 993 and 1019. What the visitor sees on the headland today is a single site with three layers: the Iberian village, the watchtower begun in 1441 against Algiers-based corsairs, and the 18th-century sanctuary and lighthouse built alongside it.

What the town lived off for two centuries was cork. A young stopper-maker is recorded in the parish books in 1760; by 1845 there were 31 cork factories employing 327 people; in 1900 Manufacturas de Corcho S.A. was founded here and led Spanish industrial exports through the 1920s. The Can Mario water tower and the workers' clubs and casinos of the old town are what the industry left behind, along with the Museu del Suro de Catalunya, which is still the reference museum for cork anywhere. After the Civil War tourism replaced it: the Russian-built castle and botanical garden at Cap Roig, laid out from the mid-1920s by Nicolai Woevodsky and Dorothy Webster and now holding some 800 species, is the emblem of that second economy. The writer Josep Pla, born here in 1897, is the third industry — the Fundació Josep Pla on Carrer Nou runs the archive and the walking routes that carry his name.

The summer calendar is built on havaneres, the sailors' songs that came back from Cuba, sung on the sand with a cremat of burnt rum passed around: Calella's cantada in early July is the best known on the whole coast, and Tamariu closes the season — the 30th edition falls on 5 September 2026. Around them sit the Festa Major de Llafranc at the end of August, the Swim Out swing festival, sardanes on Plaça Nova and in the Port Bo, the Cicle de Concerts d'Estiu, an evening market on summer Thursdays, and in October the Festival de Jazz Costa Brava, in its 32nd edition, at the municipal theatre.

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