For about twelve and half hours on a Friday, my mother and I were a part of a group of nineteen people including one bus driver, a bilingual guide named Carlos from Colombia and his fetching but absent-minded assistant, from Italy, and sixteen paying guests, including one young woman whose payment had not gone through at the beginning of the trip, made our way from the center of Barcelona through three countries and then back again to the same place in the evening. Though the trip was marketed as visiting through three countries in one day: Spain, France, and Andorra, in another sense we spent all day traveling through one country, Catalonia, with its complicated history and geography a part of the tale of borders and the people who inhabit such borderlands. Interestingly, the group that we had was made up of people who were not Catalans. There was not a single native of the region in our group–except for perhaps the driver, whose English was extremely limited.

The history of Catalonia itself is a complicated one. The region itself got its modern identity starting in the days of Charlemagne, when his efforts to create a Spanish march to beat back the Umayyad caliphate in Spain led to the establishment of territories in what became the County of Barcelona. This area had a high degree of autonomy from the larger Carolingian empire, and eventually became attached to the larger crown of Aragon, which itself ended up with a sprawling empire including the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, Sicily, and Naples. Despite the Spanish turn of the area, the region also maintained its interest in France, with various wars and alliances in the area of Languedoc. Unfortunately, while Catalonia has always remained a separate area from the rest of Spain, especially the area of Castile with its dominating tendencies, Catalan land was ceded by Spain in 1659 in the area of Roussillon to end a war that had went badly for the Spaniards, thus leaving Catalan-speaking land divided into three countries–the small microstate of Andorra, which remains to date the only Catalan-speaking nation in the world, the area of Catalonia in Roussillon that is still a part of Southern France, and the main part of Catalonia which seeks its independence even now from Spain.

Each part of the area of Catalonia has developed in its own way. Catalonia, like Quebec in Canada, proudly displays its linguistic separation from other regions, with its road signs in Catalan. Our first stop at a roadside gas station and restaurant looked out over a beautiful area where a power plant had been built in 1975 and a town–other than a medieval monastery–removed out of the floodwaters that were the result of a dam being built for irrigation for the agricultural country there. Other than Barcelona, Catalonia is not a place of very large cities, with most of its areas being agricultural in nature. When you cross over the Pyrenees into France, there are lovely small towns like Ax-Les-Thermes, where we had about an hour break, and where my mother was able to find a collectible elephant. I found a spa that had been popular with people like Gabriel Faure and others during La Belle Epoque, but it was for swimming, and we were not equipped to swim, not for soaking one’s feet in as I would wish to do.

From there on to Andorra, the trip wound its way through the gorgeous Pyrenees mountains, a mountain range whose location has made it somewhat less famous for people to travel than the Alps, but whose beauty must be seen to be believed. Endless vistas of green grass and lichens and stark mountain grandeur, most of it lonely and lacking human habitation, except for the occasional seasonal ski resort, can be found in the area. It is remarkable to see this area and think of gun smuggling going on in the Spanish Civil War, or knights like Roland seeking to make their way to defeat the Muslims in al-Andalus as having passed through these high mountain passes on their way to what they hoped would be profit and glory, and it is even more remarkable to think of how crowded these roads get on a Friday night as people flee the city to seek weekends in the cooler areas.

When we got to Andorra, we found more lonely mountain valleys with stark heights overlooking small towns, none larger than the capital of about 30,000 people or so in Andorra-la-Vella, with the people making use of every valley possible to raise cattle or put a store or restaurant on it. The capital of Andorra-la-Vella is a town that is full of stores whose low taxes make it attractive for tourists–who must not spend more than $900 or buy more than 200 cigarettes unless they want to deal with Andorran customs agents. The city is also full of gorgeous architecture and remarkably friendly people who nonetheless want to keep their country green, as they make plain in many ways. Multiple historical centers are spread across the central part of the city, with other parts of the city being devoted to housing, more of which is going up all the time to encourage those who want to work and settle there, with street signs frequently in Catalan as well to show a tobacco shop or an alcohol shop or a kebab store or a chocolate shop or some lovely ancient church or something of that nature.

By the time we left Andorra, it was about 4PM. While it was still cool when we arrived at 2PM, the hour it took for us to eat lunch (review forthcoming) was sufficient for the temperature to drastically increase, and it was quite toasty when we left. Our group was pretty tired by that time, so a lot of napping took place between our departure from Andorra to our arrival back in Barcelona at 7:30PM or so, after we had gotten delayed at the border while waiting for someone to come and check out the bus and make sure that everything was okay and that no one was smuggling large amounts of cigarettes or something like that. All in all, it had been an enjoyable tour and a good way to see new countryside, at least new to me and to the others with me, all of whom relished the chance to explore the world and see the three parts of Catalonia in all of their bucolic splendor.