A modernista beach town thirty minutes from Barcelona that turned itself into Catalonia's capital of festivals, drag, and unapologetic pleasure.
The train from Barcelona-Sants takes about thirty-five minutes, tracing the coast south past refineries and apartment blocks until, somewhere past Castelldefels, the water turns clean and the towns start looking like they mean it. Sitges announces itself with the silhouette of Sant Bartomeu i Santa Tecla, the whitewashed baroque church that sits on a small rocky promontory called Punta de les Anines, dividing the old town’s beach from the newer stretch of sand running west. It’s one of the most photographed churches in Catalonia for good reason — it looks like it was placed there by someone with a very good eye for composition, though of course it predates that particular vanity by a couple of centuries.
Modernisme by the Sea
Sitges got rich in the nineteenth century on colonial trade with Cuba, and the returning “Americanos” built themselves houses in the same Modernisme style that Gaudí and his contemporaries were putting up in Barcelona — you can see it clearly in the wrought iron, ceramic tile, and curved facades scattered through the old town. The painter Santiago Rusiñol adopted the town as his own around the turn of the twentieth century, hosting the Festes Modernistes here and filling a house on the seafront, now the Cau Ferrat museum, with El Grecos and ironwork. That bohemian, artist-friendly streak never really left. By the 1960s and 70s, Sitges had become one of the first openly gay-friendly resort towns in Spain, well before the country’s own laws caught up, and today it’s one of Europe’s most established LGBTQ+ destinations, with a Pride celebration each June that fills the seafront promenade.
Carnival and the Film Festival
I happened to be there in October, which meant I missed both Carnival — one of the largest and most flamboyant in Spain, weeks of parades and drag pageantry that turn the old town upside down — and Pride, but I landed instead in the middle of the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival, which has been running since 1968 and has become the world’s premier genre-film festival, drawing horror and fantasy directors from everywhere. The town has a talent for turning any excuse into a proper celebration. Even on an ordinary Tuesday evening, the passeig along the beach filled with people walking slowly, stopping for vermouth, in no visible hurry to be anywhere else.
I spent my last afternoon on Platja de Sant Sebastià, the beach just north of the church, watching paddleboarders navigate around swimmers with the kind of good-natured chaos that seems to define the whole town — dense, warm, unbothered.
When to go: June brings Pride and warm sea water; October’s Film Festival offers a quieter, cooler alternative with the beaches nearly empty in the evenings.