Girona is a nice, quite ancient city of Catalonia. It has some Roman ruins and a medieval fortress. As usual we read about it in a guide book and decided to go. It took fifty minutes to get there by bus from Lloret de Mar, the city we stayed in. We’ve spent the whole day there and it seems like we’ve seen the most of its historical part.

Panoramic view of the old city

Most of all we liked the old part of the city with its ancient fortress surrounded with a huge wall. The wall is several miles long. It has a tower in each corner and every time we achieved the tower we thought: "Ok, this one is going to be the last one". But then we saw another piece of the wall ending with a tower and kept walking and walking and walking. That’s when we imagined how endless the Great Chinese Wall can seem to be to those who walk along it. But we did not walk through all the wall of Girona’s old fortress. Though it was a nice walk. Inside of the walls of a medieval city there are some quiet places with green grass, trees and a pond with red fishes. There are also two big cathedrals that were started as Gothic and finished as Baroque ones. They are huge inside and the main cathedral could contain all the population of the city of the time of its construction.

The old city and fortress

One of the sights of Girona is the Jewish district with narrow cobble stone streets and houses which windows overlook the neighbor windows right across the street. It’s fun to go along those streets, to go through tiny dark arches leading to the spacious green round yards, where everything is full of history and stories about the lives of its inhabitants.

Jewish architect. Sculpture

Actually the city stands on the Onyar river that separates its old part from the other part of Girona. It’s interesting to see that homes are located along the embankment, right on the river, crowded to each other. It reminds more of Italian renaissance cities then of Spain, like in the painting by Marieschi “The Old Rialto Bridge” in the Hermitage museum, representing old Venice and Grand Canal homes in its everyday appearance of the 17th century with lines of washing hanging out of the windows.

Onyar river

The river itself is pretty shallow. That day it was only about 0.5m (1.5ft) deep and full of huge fishes that seemed not swimming but dug through into the sand bottom! Girona was a very interesting city to visit for us.
Sasha’s parents have been to Spain in 1999, and they also visited Girona then. It’s fun to compare the following pictures, taken by Sasha and his Dad at the same place with 4 years difference (here is Dasha and Sasha’s Mom Elena sitting next to a not very talkative girlfriend):