Santa Pau is a medieval (14th C) walled village in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Here I am soaking up the cafe culture in the main square, drinking tea and knitting a sock in honour of International Knit in Public Day. It was quite something to walk up the hill to the town, looking up at very austere stone walls mostly with very narrow windows, and then enter the town to see lots of balconies and larger windows and lots of plants and flowers. The street plan is very irregular with lots of nooks and crannies, and dead ends, and houses that have been built and rebuilt over a few hundred years. And lots of tourists too!
We stopped at the town of Olot later in the day to walk up to the Montsacopa volcanic crater just above town. It's an almost perfect circular depression, now grass filled, that we walked around before descending to the old town. And of course we found the perfect cafe to have a light meal (I had a delicious mixed green salad with warmed goat cheese) all the while watching the townspeople stroll by. There were lots of kids playing in the square while their parents visited in the terrace bars and cafes. In these small towns, it's only tourists out and about in the afternoons and all the shops close around 1 PM, reopening around 5. This early evening time is when families seem to shop and visit, teenagers flock together, and lovers stroll...a good people watching time.
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