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Hostal Juventus , 14 rooms
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Offering simple rooms with free Wi-Fi, Hostal Juventus is just 20 metres from Portbou Beach and a 5-minute walk from the train station. It serves a continental breakfast in its café-bar.
Each room at Hostal Juventus has a kettle and access to a shared bathroom.Some rooms have a terrace.
Restaurants, bars and cafés can be found in the centre of Portbou, a 5-minute walk from the guest house.
Staff can provide information on the surrounding area and the activities on offer, including surfing, hiking and diving.
There are several walking routes in and around Portbou, which is less than 1 km from the French border. Roses is a 30-minute drive away, while Girona is 65 km away.
Hostal Juventus 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.