Your private transfer collects you from the airport or the train station in Barcelona or Girona and drives you up into the hills to Viladrau, a village of chestnut woods and stone houses that Barcelona families have been escaping to for about a century.

In the evening we meet you in person to answer any last-minute questions and give you the latest trail conditions, and then the rest of it’s yours. Wander the village, look up at Matagalls, and begin the traditional first-night ritual of quietly recounting your socks.

• Accommodation: hotel in Viladrau, breakfast included

The biggest day of the week, and the one that resets what you thought Catalonia looked like. You leave Viladrau and climb into Montseny, a massif so unlike the country around it that UNESCO made it a Biosphere Reserve: beech, oak and fir, deep green and dripping, the kind of forest you’d swear belonged several hundred miles north.

Then you come out onto open ridge and the illusion breaks beautifully. Catalonia rolls away in every direction, hazy and enormous, and on a clear day the sea is there on the edge of it.

You pass through El Brull, a hamlet with a Romanesque church, a handful of houses and a view straight back at the massif you’ve just crossed. The long descent to Aiguafreda runs down through the southern edge of the park.

It’s 22 km (13.7 miles) with a lot of down in the second half. Start early, take the whole day, and don’t be a hero before breakfast.

• Hiking today: 22 km (13.7 miles), 921 m (3,022 ft) ascent, 1,216 m (3,989 ft) descent, 6 to 7 hours
• Accommodation: hotel near Aiguafreda, breakfast included

Shorter and gentler than yesterday, with one climb that earns its keep: the pull up onto the Cingles de Bertí, a wall of cliffs that runs for miles above the Congost valley. You spend a good while hiking along the top of it, which is exactly as good as it sounds, with the Montseny massif behind you and the valley a long way down on your right.

Then comes the strangest place on the whole route. Sant Miquel de Fai is a monastery built into the underside of an overhanging cliff, with a river falling past the entrance and caves running back into the rock behind it. Monks have been there since the 10th century, which suggests they knew something about picking a spot.

The descent afterwards is all terraces, medieval ruins and small hidden waterfalls, and it finishes at a 17th-century watermill that somebody has restored and turned into your hotel for the night. It still has the mill race.

• Hiking today: 20.5 km (12.7 miles), 778 m (2,552 ft) ascent, 962 m (3,156 ft) descent, 5 to 6 hours
• Accommodation: restored 17th-century mill near Bigues i Riells, breakfast included

The easy day, and it arrives at exactly the right point in the week. A 15-minute transfer takes you to the start at Sant Feliu de Codines, and from there it’s 14.6 km (9.1 miles) of pine woods, field edges and quiet farm tracks with the trail well marked the whole way.

This is the day for long lunches and for noticing things: the dry-stone walls holding up terraces nobody has farmed in fifty years, the masies, the big old Catalan farmhouses sitting alone in the middle of their own land.

You finish in Sant Llorenç Savall, where Teresa and her family run the place you’re staying and will almost certainly feed you better than you were expecting.

• Hiking today: 14.6 km (9.1 miles), 554 m (1,818 ft) ascent, 645 m (2,116 ft) descent, 4 to 5 hours
• Accommodation: rural hotel in Sant Llorenç Savall, breakfast included

Today you’re in Sant Llorenç del Munt i l’Obac, and the rock changes color. The conglomerate here is rust and ochre, weathered into round towers and fins, with holm oak growing out of the gaps. El Montcau and La Mola are the two peaks everyone in Barcelona knows by silhouette.

La Mola Peak is an optional 8 km (5 mile) round trip, and there’s an 11th-century Romanesque monastery on the summit at 1,104 m (3,623 ft), which is a reasonable reward for a detour. Take it and the day is 24 km (14.9 miles). Leave it and the day is 18 km (11.2 miles) and still excellent, and you’ll be in Mura in time for a long afternoon.

Mura is the reason people remember this stage. It has fewer than 250 residents, stone lanes too narrow for cars, terracotta roofs stacked down the hillside and a Romanesque church in the middle of it all. It’s the kind of village people describe on the way home and get slightly emotional about.

• Hiking today: 24 km (14.9 miles) with La Mola, or 18 km (11.2 miles) without, 889 m (2,917 ft) ascent, 890 m (2,920 ft) descent, 5 to 8 hours
• Accommodation: rural apartments in Mura, breakfast included

Sant Llorenç del Munt i l’Obac has a back half that almost nobody hikes, and this is it. The trail from Mura to Rellinars threads through remote pine forest, along craggy ridgelines and down into small valleys that feel a very long way from a city you could reach in an hour.

Come in spring and the streams are running and the whole place is in flower. Come in October and the light goes long and gold by four in the afternoon and the mushroom hunters are out, moving quietly, telling nobody anything.

Rellinars has fewer than a thousand people and a Romanesque church from the 11th century. You stay just outside it at a working farmhouse, which is the correct way to end a day like this one.

• Hiking today: 19.3 km (12 miles), 576 m (1,890 ft) ascent, 621 m (2,037 ft) descent, 5 to 6 hours
• Accommodation: farmhouse in Rellinars, breakfast included

This is the day the whole week has been hiking toward. Montserrat appears on the horizon early and doesn’t look real: a single massif of hundreds of rounded stone fingers standing straight up out of flat farmland, with a monastery wedged onto a ledge halfway up it.

Montserrat Monastery has been there since 1025. Benedictine monks still live and sing in it, and it holds La Moreneta, the Black Madonna, a Romanesque carving that has drawn pilgrims up this mountain for nine hundred years. It is the spiritual heart of Catalonia, and for a thousand years the only way to reach it was the way you are about to: on foot, up the pilgrim path.

The climb is long and steady, and it takes you up past El Cavall Bernat, a free-standing rock tower that climbers have been testing themselves on since the 1930s, and El Montgròs. The path underfoot is stone, worn smooth and shining by a thousand years of pilgrims who climbed it before you.

Then you arrive at the monastery on foot, through the back, among the day trippers who came up on the rack railway and will be gone by six. You’re not going anywhere. When the last rack railway drops down the mountain, Montserrat empties out, and what is left belongs to the few dozen people still up here. The rock towers turn gold, then rose, then black against the stars. Swifts cut through the updrafts below the basilica. The bells go out over an empty square, into a silence a thousand years deep. Almost nobody ever sees this. You get to fall asleep in it.

If you’d rather take the short version, catch the train from Monistrol de Montserrat and hike the final 12 km (7.5 miles). The ticket isn’t included, and you still arrive at the monastery on foot, which is the part that stays with you.

• Hiking today: 17 km (10.6 miles), or 12 km (7.5 miles) from Monistrol, 831 m (2,726 ft) ascent, 496 m (1,627 ft) descent, 5 to 6 hours
• Accommodation: 3-star hotel in the monastery grounds at Montserrat, breakfast included

You wake up on the mountain, which is the point. Go and see the basilica and the Black Madonna before the first cable car of the day arrives, or take one of the short trails that climb higher into the towers for a view back down over the whole monastery.

When you’re ready, the rack railway drops you at Monistrol de Montserrat for the train into central Barcelona, and it’s genuinely straightforward. We can also arrange a private transfer straight to Barcelona if you’d rather not deal with any of it after a week of hiking.

Plenty of our hikers tack two or three nights in Barcelona onto the end. You’ve just earned some tapas.

Our Mountains of Catalonia hiking tour runs from March to November, and it doesn’t run in July or August, when it’s too hot. The best hiking is March to mid-June and mid-September to mid-November. Spanish Easter Week (March 19th to 28th, 2027), all of June and all of September carry an €85 per person high season supplement.

Seven nights, all booked for you, in a deliberate mix of rural hotels and 3 and 4-star hotels. You stay in Viladrau at the start, then near Aiguafreda, then in a restored 17th-century watermill near Bigues i Riells, a family-run rural hotel in Sant Llorenç Savall, rural apartments in the medieval village of Mura, a working farmhouse outside Rellinars, and finally a 3-star hotel inside the monastery grounds at Montserrat.

These are the properties on our standard itinerary. Alternatives in the same category are available if you prefer, final selections depend on availability at the time of booking, and an upgrade may change the price. Breakfast is included every morning, and one dinner is included during the week.

Your main bag moves between hotels for you every day, so you hike with a daypack holding water, lunch, a layer. You climb lighter, you move faster, and you reach each village with your legs still fresh enough to go and explore it.

We grade this one Moderate to Challenging. Nothing on the route is technical, and you need no mountaineering experience. What makes it real is the accumulation: six hiking days in a row, 4 to 6 hours on the trail most days, and climbs of 554 m (1,818 ft) to 921 m (1,818 to 3,022 ft).

Underfoot it’s rural paths, single-track dirt trail and quiet secondary roads, with some long steep sections on the Cingles de Bertí and on the final push up to Montserrat. If you hike regularly and you train for it, you’ll enjoy every day of it. Your free personalized fitness plan (€300 value) is built to get you there.

Included: a private transfer on Day 1 from the airport or the main train station in Barcelona or Girona to your first hotel in Viladrau, plus every transfer described in the itinerary, including the 15-minute drive to the Day 4 trailhead at Sant Feliu de Codines.

Not included: the journey home from Montserrat on your final day. It’s genuinely easy: take the Cremallera rack railway down to Monistrol de Montserrat, then the R5 or R50 FGC train to Plaça Espanya in central Barcelona, where you can pick up the metro or the Aerobús to Terminal 1 or 2. For Barcelona Sants or Girona, take metro Line 3 from Plaça Espanya to Sants Estació and a Renfe train from there.

If you’d rather not think about any of it, we can book a private transfer from Montserrat to Barcelona for €205 one way, for up to 4 people.

Montserrat means “serrated mountain”, and one look explains the name: a single massif of hundreds of rounded stone pillars rising straight out of the plain. Halfway up it sits a Benedictine monastery founded in 1025, still home to a community of monks, and to the Black Madonna, the carved Romanesque figure that has made this Catalonia’s most important pilgrimage site for a thousand years.

It’s also a symbol of Catalan identity, which is why nearly every Catalan you meet has been up at least once. You arrive on foot on Day 7, up the old pilgrim path, and you sleep there. Almost nobody else does.

Breakfast every morning and one dinner are included. Beyond that you eat where you want, which in this part of Catalonia is a good problem to have. Several of the masies along the route, the big stone Catalan farmhouses that have worked this land for centuries, are now estate restaurants, and the cooking is properly local: foraged wild mushrooms in autumn, mongetes del Ganxet, the short fat white beans Catalans get competitive about, artisanal farmhouse cheese, and wine from D.O. Pla de Bages.

In the smaller villages the evening choice can come down to your own hotel, so plenty of hikers add half board at €250 per person and stop thinking about it. Carry lunch and water with you: there’s not always somewhere to buy either mid-route.

Travel insurance isn’t included and you need a policy that covers multi-day hiking, emergency evacuation and hospital care, plus trip cancellation. Our free Adventure Travel Insurance Finder compares policies and gives you a recommendation in under a minute.

A 30% deposit holds your dates and the balance is due 40 days before you hike. We then book every night of your trip, and if we can’t secure your accommodation, you get a full refund. Our tour terms and conditions cover the rest.