Encamp

Encamp occupies the centre of the Andorran valley in a way that is easy to read from above — it sits in a widening of the main valley between Canillo to the east and Escaldes to the west, with the Valira d’Orient threading through its lower section and the Grandvalira gondola starting its climb into the mountains from a station on the edge of town. It is not the most immediately beautiful parish, its main street lined with the functional apartment blocks and small shops of a town that serves residents rather than positioning itself for visitors. This, in Andorra, turns out to be a quality. The cafés in the centre are full of people who live here.

I came to Encamp the first time because of the automobile museum, which I had read about in a footnote and which sounded sufficiently eccentric to be worth an afternoon. The Museu Nacional de l’Automòbil is housed in a purpose-built space near the town centre and holds approximately a hundred and twenty vehicles spanning from the 1890s to the 1970s — motorcycles, cars, carriages, bicycles — arranged in a chronological sequence that reads as an accidental social history of European mobility. The collection was built from a private donation and has the idiosyncratic character of things accumulated through personal obsession rather than institutional acquisition. There are cars here I have never seen anywhere else: small French manufacturers from the 1920s, prewar Spanish vehicles of uncertain provenance, a Hispano-Suiza that would not look out of place in a museum ten times the size. I spent three hours and left reluctantly.

The gondola up to the Grandvalira ski area departs from the edge of town in winter and is itself a reasonable reason to come to Encamp. The approach to skiing from below the resort — you ascend through the village, then through the trees, then onto open snowfields — gives the mountain a different quality than arriving by car at a ski resort car park. You earn a degree of altitude that feels physical and orienting. The Encamp entry point accesses the same Grandvalira domain as Pas de la Casa and El Tarter but tends to be significantly less crowded, a fact that the resort does not advertise prominently but that local skiers use systematically.

In summer, the same gondola carries hikers up to the Grau Roig plateau and the terrain above Encamp. The walk from the top station down to the Pessons lakes — a cluster of glacial tarns in a cirque above 2,300 metres — takes about ninety minutes each way and passes through a landscape of granite, wildflowers, and marmot colonies so dense that the animals barely register your presence anymore. I sat above one of the lakes for an hour watching a marmot carry vegetation into its burrow with a focused efficiency I found genuinely admirable.

The Romanesque church of Sant Miquel d’Engolasters, a short drive from central Encamp above the Engolasters lake, is another of Andorra’s undervisited medieval sites. The freestanding Lombard tower stands in a clearing in the forest with a stillness that is almost theatrical — you arrive through trees, the building appears suddenly, and the surprise of it makes the first impression disproportionately strong. The lake below, a reservoir created in the twentieth century that has long since been naturalized into the landscape, is a forty-minute walk through pine forest.

When to go: December through March for skiing via the gondola, with less crowding than the Pas de la Casa approach. June through September for hiking — the gondola runs in summer and gives efficient access to the Pessons lakes. The automobile museum is open year-round and worth two to three hours of deliberate attention.