Sant Joan de les Abadesses

Known as "the cradle of Catalonia," Ripoll grew around a great Romanesque monastery founded by Count Wilfred the Hairy, and its heritage of medieval manuscripts, iron forges, and mountain railways makes it one of the most historically layered towns in the Catalan Pyrenees.

The historic capital of the Vall de Bas, El Mallol sits on a hilltop in Girona province where a medieval viscount's castle once governed the valley below.

A Catalan village in Girona whose flower-draped wooden balconies along Carrer Teixeda have drawn painters and photographers for generations, and whose streets trace the line of the old royal road between Olot and Vic.

One of Catalonia's highest inhabited villages, sitting at 1,550 metres above the Rigard valley in Girona, its Romanesque church preserving medieval paintings that earned the entire settlement national cultural heritage status.

Perched on a basalt cliff above two rivers in Girona province, Castellfollit de la Roca is a medieval village whose volcanic rock streets and Renaissance church tower over one of Cataluña's most dramatic natural platforms.

A high Catalan village where a Romanesque church tower rises above the source of the Llobregat river and a landmark modernist cement factory stands converted into a museum at the edge of town.

One of the oldest continuously settled places in the Pyrenees, Llívia was already a Roman municipal capital, Iulia Lybica, when Julius Caesar granted it the same legal rights as Rome itself.