With Picasso in Gósol

The pastoral tranquillity of the Berguedà mountain drew Pablo Picasso to another of these villages. On the back of a mule loaded with his easels, he climbed to the modest town of Gósol to spend the spring of 1906. They say the genius, who stayed at the only local inn, sketched more than one hundred works that marked the beginning of his cubist era in just three months. He painted the houses of the village and the landscape and kept notes in a travel diary, the Carnet Catalan, a reproduction of which is kept at the Centre Picasso de Gósol. While part of the group visits this museum and enjoys the local cuisine, the rest of us pull on our hiking boots and take a circular route that will take us around the perimeter of one of the the most iconic mountains of Catalonia: the Pedraforca. Across 17 kilometres and 790 metres of elevation change, we see the four sides of this rocky colossus, in addition to traversing a stretch of the road that the Cathars walked in the Middle Ages as they fled from France.