Freewheeling in Catalonia

For me the highlight was the day in Girona, walking around the old city and exploring odd corners.  On the cycling, the first day was good and varied, with some very pretty villages, and some in our party really enjoyed the swimming in the river.  The route on Day 3 (around Les Planes) looked a bit contrived, but we understood the problem of finding a circular route.   In practice it was OK and again the swimmers enjoyed their swim, and we all really liked the alternative route back to the hotel at the end of the day from Sant Feliu de Pallerols.  The middle section of the route on Day 4 was a bit tedious by the busy road, but OK.  The way into Girona and the way out of Girona were both good.  I also enjoyed the last day down to the coast more than I expected.

A really enjoyable, well organised holiday with lots of extra experiences along the way - perfect as a relaxing but 'doing' holiday!

Overall our experience with this holiday was a very good one. The bike initially provided by the hire company for my wife was too heavy for some of the hills but they were able to swap this for a lighter one on the second day. The route guidance was generally clear and accurate, with one or two exceptions in towns where I guess road layouts may have changed. The rides were generally of about the right length and severity for us, although we did add a lengthy detour on the second day as we had already visited the first village stop in the second day itinenary at the end of the first day. The accommodation was varied but always of a high standard and characterful.

We weren't able to benefit from most of the en route food places. One was full, and a couple were closed, and in hot weather we weren't that hungry. The best place we found was the railway station at St Feliu de Pallerois, serving snacks and drinks.

We really enjoyed the self-guided style of biking. So much of Europe is crowded with tourists, so this was a great way to be a tourist without anyone else sharing the experience. The trip felt like a very unique and authentic way to see the back blocks and real countryside, instead of a sanitised and organised version which so many tourist attractions have become.

A great holiday which was not too strenuous given the high temperatures. It is worth researching if there are any snack places open or take a picnic if you don't want a 3 course lunch and carry plenty of water in hotter months.

Girona was beautiful and there was time to cycle and sight-see both days. For eating out in Girona we would highly recommend the tapas bar La Tabarra (5 mins walk from the hotel) which has a great tapas menu choice and excellent wines with really friendly service (and a menu in English). Attempting to speak Catalan was appreciated by locals even if we didn't understand the reply! The bike company and taxi transfers were excellent too.

An excellent experience overall. Very clear information. Superb hotels. Great Bikes.

The Via Verdes were a great way of travelling through Catalonia. This was our first ever cycling holiday and as a couple of sprightly septuagenarians, we were absolutely chuffed to have reached the final hotel after cycling 165k over 5 days and in a heatwave too! We hope to book another Inntravel cycling holiday next year!

We have used Inntravel on numerous occasions & once again you didn't disappoint with this lovely mix of rural, city & coast for another excellent cycling holiday. Starting in Joanettes, our hosts couldn't have been nicer despite the language barrier, we were made to feel very welcome & given the weather was 34 degrees the pool was a most welcome sight. The only downside is that if you require any refreshments before the evening meal served at 8pm there is only a vending machine as the two local eateries were both closed, with one opening at 4pm. The cycling around Joanetes was easy to follow & worth the ride up the hill to cool off in the plunge pool. The ride to our next stop in Les Planes was lovely in the heat as most of the route was down hill! Les Planes was an interesting place & having an english host made ordering meals & general info much easier, the house is very quirky & the evening meals & breakfast eaten in the garden were excellent, good choice of starter, main & desert. We chose to only do part of the intended ride, stopping for lunch en route & then visiting 4 out of the seven waterfalls close by for some wild swimming (a bargain at only 5 euros each to cover all 7)! Moving on to Girona another easy ride with a couple of options along the way for more wild swimming, we arrived with plenty of time to still have a good explore of the city before heading out for our eveing meal, plenty of places to chose from. There is also a fabulous cycling cafe just off the main square which is worth a visit if you like TDF memorabilia! The final destination at S'Agaro was a fantastic finish to the holiday & I am glad we added on an extra nights stay, the hotel is lovely in a perfectly beautiful spot on the seafront with a lovely coastal walk, choice of the hotel pool, beach or various bays further around. We chose to eat out rather than in the hotel & found a lovely place half way along the seafront the Villa Laura, which had an English menu, the staff were very welcoming, the food excellent & reasonably priced. The breakfast at the Hotel had the largest selection of hot & cold food & again it was lovely to eat outside. Jorda from the bike hire company couldn't have been more helpfull with information & he took time to go through all the necessary info regarding the bikes, our luggage was all moved like clockwork & we had no issues. Overall a fabulous holiday with no complaints.

Lovely cycling along safe via-verde paths in rural countryside. The times of free-wheeling were great fun. We found meals in local restaurants very reasonably priced. Would recommend Restaurant La Barca on the the journey to Girona. It was nice to spend a day sightseeing in Girona and then to finish up by the sea at S'Agaro. 

This was our first experience of a cycling holiday.  Not being in a car for a week!  Being outside for most of each day.  The area is geologically formed by many volcanoes.  The museum Viatge al centre la vida (A journey to the Centre of Life) in Olot was well worth a visit. Is very understandable by children as awell as adults (closes 14.00 to 15.00hrs for lunch).  The coastal wallkway in S'Agaro also has many interesting information boards on the geology of what you are walking on and the surrounding area!  Decaf tea (and sometimes) milk is difficult to find.  Take your own if you are that addicted!

Beautiful Catalonia enjoyed from safe cycling routes through interesting and charming villages, towns and countryside.

We really enjoyed this trip. Everyone was friendly and relaxed. It is such a beautiful area particularly up in the hills. Apart from the accommodation in Girona all the other places we stayed were excellent and a bit different to the norm.

A lovely route with local people providing traditional well cooked food in unique locations for the first two locations and elsewhere easy access to many places to visit.  You will come across great architecture with a more French look and feel than Spain that very quickly reveals its past.  So much off traffic cycling with some hills - so e-bike was super helpful to enjoy those trips to see waterfalls and there are more waterfalls to see if you want to lock up the bike and walk in some of the sites.  Watch out for walnut trees in late September when the nuts are scattered on the floor and ready to munch on.  There will never be too much bread, cheese and meat with tomato relish for breakfast.......

An excellent relaxing cycling holiday from Inntravel. Thoroughly enjoyed the route on the almost completely traffic free path. The varied nature of the hotels from rural, to town and the coast gave an additional depth to the experience of the journey. Similarly the food also changed in its presentation and authenticity. It was just such a great experience to see the changes as we cycled from inland to the sea.

The bikes were good too and the panniers were waterproof (luckily as we experienced a couple of downpours). The plastic map holders on the handlebars also worked well. We had a puncture en route and the bike support team brought us another inner tube that evening in case our repair (now our spare) started to leak.

As seems to be the case when travelling abroad, the opening hours of shops/restaurants isn't as might be hoped from our experiences living in the UK with shops closed in the middle of the day and recommended restaurants shut for the month of August so that the proprietor can take their own holiday! However we found alternatives relatively easily and found that almost everywhere we ate, the food was of good quality, even if the menu was often in Catalan and no one was available to translate it fully into english! The fact that often people didn't speak english was quite refreshing, like travelling in the old days when one had to find ways to communicate when neither spoke the other's language.

The cycling route was fairly easy to find as it was such a well known path but local changes meant that in a number of places the route wasnt as was given in the instructions. I didn't find the maps much help as I couldn't easily see the cycle route marked when I looked the night before; this was particularly so for the smaller scale map. Google maps were able to help where there was uncertainty. There were a couple of days where parts of the routes involved cycling where one had previously cycled but we used this as an opportunity to try out different places to stop and eat and drink! There were also a couple of optional excursions early in the day which we didn't do as I wasn't sure if we would run out of time as we tended to set off towards mid-morning rather than first thing after a late breakfast!

My only criticism was that the details of transfer to Mas el ferres wasnt sufficently detailed/clear so that when our plane was delayed and we couldn't take the bus as planned and had to change plans on the day to take the train, this was quite challenging as we were travelling to a small place some distance from the airport and we had to make a lot of changes. I did ring Inntravel who were as helpful as they could be in the circumstances. Also booking the bus from S'Agaro to Barcelona on my phone using their app was problematic as the route only came up by searching Agaro rather than S'Agaro. The bus was also late and the taxi that dropped us to the stop was suggesting that the bus left at a different time to that we had booked and he didn't seem certain that he had dropped us at the right place. The bus then went all the way to the airpoirt when the instrucitons had suggested we would need to get the train from Barcelona central back to the airport (as we had done when we arrived). If I had spoken Spanish, all these issues would have been much easier for me to manage. Having the internet on the phone was essential (mine wasn't working when I arrived). However we booked at the last minute - about a week before - and Inntravel were really good at helping me book the holiday, arranging delivery of the important holiday pack and being on the end of the phone when I needed help. A really great holiday, and even admitted to have been enjoyed by my accompanying, initially reluctant, teenager!

We enjoyed the waterfall, bathing spots on the rivers around Las Planes but there was no mention that there was a 5 euro charge and that this should be put on your phone to cover all the swimming spots for that day. The volcano museum in Olot was very good to understand the Parc de Garrotxia but as said above it had moved across town some 4 months ago.  Girona is a very beautiful city and well worth a whole day's exploration. There is a tourist card you can buy to gain entry to the art museum, cathedral and basilica which represents a significant saving.

The people throughout the holiday were very pleasant in the restaurants and bars and at all times it was easy to find somewhere to get a drink and something to eat. The logistics ie flight, taxi, luggage and bike arrangements, all worked seamlessly to provide a very relaxing holiday with no hassles at all. Thank you for that.

HIGHLIGHTS: We loved Hotel Can Garay; plunge pools; pool and sea at S'Agaro; Amer was nice but would it be worth mentioning that if you go into Amer there is a climb back to the track; Angles wasn't worth visiting and we got confused by the references to the petrol station BUT the approach into Girona was lovely with the left hand turn down to the river (why didn't you mention that you could bathe there?); Girona itself.

INNTRAVEL NOTE: These customers combined our cycling holiday Freewheeling in Catalonia with our Girona City add-on

The Garrotxa Volcanic Zone Natural Park is absolutely gorgeous and we very much enjoyed cycling along the via verde and surrounding area, even if temperatures were in the high 30s for the duration of our holiday. The people we met on and off our bikes were almost all locals and they were very friendly and helpful. Though a photo translation app on our phones proved useful when translating menus from Catalan as not everyone spoke English. We had to book our own hotel on the coast but the other hotels booked by Inntravel were all good. The meals at the impressive Hotel Can Gary were particularly good, though there was no air conditioning here unlike elsewhere, and as the church bells chime every 15 minutes, it proved impossible to leave the window open.

Given the heat, we loved the pool (and peace and quiet) of Mas El Ferres, and the waterfall pools around Les Planes - the Gorg de Can Poeti close to the hotel even has a natural jacuzzi!

The trip notes were generally good, though it was too hot to follow the GPX routes on our phones (mine nearly melted when I tried). The Girona walking route notes were also excellent, though I would recommend extending the walk to the full length of the city walls.

One tip is to not only provide your height details for the bike hire, but also to provide the frame size. We ended up all having the same size bike frames despite our heights ranging from 5'3 to 6'2.

An excellent holiday. Very well organised by Inntravel, very smooth and easy. Catalonia was absolutely stunning and we really felt that we had seen many sides of it, from rural farming, remote villages, the suburbs, industrial estates, city, to the lovely uncrowded coastal resort of S'Agaro.  

Many of the local restaurants, particularly at the beginning of our trip, had set menus which included free local wine. Exceptional value for money!

The best restuarant of our holiday, which we happened upon on our bike ride from Girona to S'Agaro, was the Font Picant restaurant. I think this had come under new management/ownership in the last 3 weeks, so they had not had time to do menus in English yet. The outside area was lovely, although not really a garden, as described in the notes. The food was outstanding, service brilliant, wine excellent and it was unbelievably inexpensive. We had guessed the bill would be around 80 Euros for 2, but it was only 30 Euros. And that wasn't a mistake. I would love to go back there and eat more of their food!

We did not go to do the walk from S'Agaro to La Fosca as suggested. We were however tempted by the lovely description of Palamos, so took a bus there. Very disappointing, not very charming and a bit down market. Would not recommend. The area around S'Agaro is much nicer. Gorgeous coastal path to run along from Hotel S'Agaro. 

May be useful for travellers to know that most shops close from 1.30 to 4.30pm. Also, the top rated restaurants in Girona are nearly all closed on Mondays, which was the day that we were there. It didn't matter, we didn't starve!

A fantastic holiday with very good accommodation. The dinners that were included at two of the hotels were excellent. The cycling is mostly flatish or downhill, with a few uphill bits, and is mostly on cycling/walking tracks. The countryside was beautiful, weather very good for cycling (in early May) and the bikes were excellent quality. Bike delivery and luggage transfers were all dealt with very efficiently with no problems at all. 
Some of the trip notes were wrong and need to be corrected/updated but we learnt to rely on the signposts on the Via Verde instead, which were very good.

Our arrival in Girona happened to coincide with the annual flower festival, with spectacular displays all over the city, live music and people dancing in the streets. It added an unforgettable dimension to a beautiful city.

We would recommend spending time in Girona even at the loss of a days cycling.

Ending the day around Joanetes at Restaurant Cal Esteve was a delight!

The natural pool in the Gorg del Murris was magical!

Ex railway trackbed and route with original stations still intact was a delight. Hotels enroute were refreshigly different in style and meals. Catalonia scenery wonderfully varied.