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Hostal Costa Blava , 20 rooms
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Hostal Costa Blava is located 100 metres from Portbou Beach. Set between the Mediterranean Sea and Albera Nature Reserve, it offers a terrace and free Wi-Fi, 4 minutes’ drive from the French border.
Rooms at the guest house feature Mediterranean-style décor and soft lighting. All include a safe and bathrooms are either shared or private.
There is a restaurant serving traditional Catalan cuisine, a bar and lounge area. Several bars, restaurants and shops are nearby and Portbou Marina is 5 minutes’ walk away.
Tourist information and massage services are both available. There are various hiking routes nearby, including the Walter Benjamin Banyuls to Portbou route. You can also go surfing and diving at the beach.
The Costa Blava is set 4 minutes’ walk from Portbou train Station and 20 km from the Cap de Creus Nature Reserve.
Hostal Costa Blava 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.