
Hotel Comodoro , 16 rooms
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This charming, family-run hotel is located in the centre of Portbou, just 50 metres from the beach. It offers a garden and free Wi-Fi, 5 minutes’ drive from the French border.
The bright rooms at Hotel Comodoro feature pastel décor and include a private bathroom. Some rooms also offer a terrace or a TV and laundry services are available.
Breakfast is served daily, including homemade jams, and several bars, restaurants and shops are within 5 minutes’ walk.
The property is just 200 metres from Portbou Train Station and you can walk to the harbour in 5 minutes.
Comodoro offers private parking for a small fee and is 30 minutes’ drive from Figueres and Collioure. You can drive to Girona and its airport in 1 hour and Perpignan is 50 km away.
Hotel Comodoro is in Portbou
Lying as it does along the French frontier, Alt Empordà is a zone of transit. It has an open, creative personality, linked to a geographical phenomenon that gives it a distinctive identity: the north wind, or Tramuntana, which can attain up to 150 kph and was described by the writer Gabriel García Márquez as a “tenacious [wind] that contains the seeds of madness”. The wind is also responsible for the astonishing quality of the light.
Portbou, Colera, Llançà, El Port de la Selva and Cadaqués, the northernmost towns on the Costa Brava, line one of its wildest stretches of coastline.
Portbou, once a village nestling in a remote cove, grew rapidly after an international railway terminus was built there in 1878, making it a stopping place for many travellers (the present station is an impressive building). Exiles from the Civil War fled north through Portbou and other frontier towns in 1939, and others fled south to escape Nazi persecution.
One was the German philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), who committed suicide there and is buried in Portbou cemetery, a veritable outlook point facing the sea.