Vic

We drove up to Vic on a Saturday morning specifically for the market, and I’ll admit I underestimated it. I’d pictured a few stalls of tomatoes and cheap sunglasses. Instead the whole Plaça Major, this huge arcaded square that looks more like a stage set than a town center, was packed wall to wall with vendors — cured meats hanging in rows, wheels of tou dels tillers cheese, old women selling snails by the kilo, a guy with nothing but different grades of olive oil. Vic takes its charcuterie seriously in a way that surprised me even after years in Mexico eating incredible food; the fuet here, that thin dry-cured sausage, is apparently considered close to definitive, and after trying three different vendors’ versions I believe it.

What I didn’t expect was the Roman temple. It’s tucked behind the town hall, half swallowed by a 19th-century mansion that got built right up against it, so you turn a corner past the market stalls and suddenly there’s this 2nd-century structure with six columns just standing there, indifferent to the ham and cheese happening thirty meters away. Lia found it funnier than I did — she kept saying it looked like the temple had wandered into the wrong postcard. There’s something very Catalan about that juxtaposition though, ancient stone next to sausage stalls, nobody making a big fuss about either.

We also climbed the bell tower of the cathedral, which is one of those places where the outside architecture (neoclassical, kind of somber, from a 18th-century rebuild) gives you zero warning for what’s inside. The walls are covered floor to ceiling in dark, almost violent murals by Josep Maria Sert, painted in sepia tones after a fire destroyed his first set during the Civil War. It’s not a pretty church in the postcard sense. It’s heavy and a little unsettling, which honestly stuck with me more than a lot of prettier cathedrals I’ve seen.

Lunch was the real point of the trip, if I’m honest. We found a small place off the square doing botifarra amb mongetes — sausage with white beans, completely unfussy — and split a plate of the local cured meats first because we hadn’t had enough yet. Vic sits up on a plain surrounded by the Collsacabra hills, and there’s a particular dry inland climate here that locals swear is why the curing works so well; whether or not that’s strictly true, I wasn’t going to argue with my mouth full.

By the time we left, mid-afternoon, the market was packing up and the square had gone quiet enough that the temple columns were the only thing still holding your attention. It’s not a place that needs a full day — we did it comfortably from Barcelona and back — but it’s the kind of stop that rewards actually being hungry when you arrive.

When to go: Saturday mornings for the weekly market; the arcaded square is far less atmospheric on a quiet weekday.