Tossa de Mar
"Ava Gardner slept here, and the whole town still seems faintly surprised by its own good luck."
A medieval castle wall drops straight into the Mediterranean here, and for one strange summer in the 1950s this fishing village became the unlikely capital of European cinema.
I came to Tossa de Mar from Barcelona on the coastal road, the one that climbs and dips through the Costa Brava’s pine headlands so many times that Lia dozed off twice and woke up each time asking if we’d arrived. When we finally did, the town announced itself the way it must have announced itself to sailors for eight hundred years: a fortified hill, the Vila Vella, standing guard over a curve of sand with its watchtowers still intact. It is the only medieval walled town left standing directly on the Catalan coast, and walking its ramparts at sunset — with the sea on one side and terracotta rooftops on the other — I understood immediately why nobody ever wanted to tear it down.
A Fishing Village That Became a Film Set
Tossa’s second identity, the one that surprised me, dates to 1950, when the American director Robert Siodmak shot Pandora and the Flying Dutchman here with Ava Gardner and James Mason. The town leaned into it hard — there’s a bronze statue of Gardner on the clifftop path below the old town, gazing out at the water she once swam in during breaks from filming, and locals still bring up the production with the specific pride of a place that briefly hosted Hollywood and never quite let go of the memory. Marc Chagall, who visited around the same era, reportedly called Tossa a “blue paradise,” and the phrase is on enough postcards and plaques that I started to wonder if the town commissioned it. Maybe it did. It’s still accurate.
What I liked best, though, had nothing to do with the film history. It was the ordinary rhythm underneath it — fishing boats still working out of the harbor at dawn, old men playing cards outside the covered market, the smell of grilled sardines drifting up from the Passeig del Mar by early evening. Tossa was a Roman settlement first (there’s a well-preserved 1st-century villa, Els Ametllers, with mosaic floors just outside the old walls), then a medieval fishing port, then briefly a magnet for Chagall and Gardner, and now a town that has figured out how to hold all of that without turning into a museum of itself.
Climbing to the Lighthouse
The walk up to the Far de Tossa, the lighthouse at the tip of the Vila Vella promontory, is short but steep enough that I was glad of the sea breeze. From up there the whole geography clicks into place: Tossa’s three beaches curling one into the next — Platja Gran in the center, Es Codolar tucked beside the castle, Mar Menuda further along — each one framed by pine-covered cliffs that fall straight into water so clear it looks tinted rather than merely clean. I sat on the lighthouse wall with a bottle of water and watched sailboats tack across the bay for longer than I meant to.
Dinner that night was grilled fish at a table close enough to the water that I could hear it against the harbor wall, and afterward we walked the old town’s narrow streets, half-lit by wrought-iron lamps, until they emptied out completely. Tossa gets crowded in August — this stretch of the Costa Brava is no secret — but even then, up on the castle walls after the day-trippers leave, it still feels like the kind of place that was built to be watched from a boat, slowly, with nowhere else to be.
When to go: June and September give you warm water and thinner crowds than peak July–August; late September into October still allows swimming with the town noticeably calmer.