Dispatch from Empúries

Last October, I went to Catalonia on a peculiar sort of a pilgrimage with my French husband. I wanted to finally visit Hostal Empúries, a seaside hotel that many of my favorite fellow travelers have been whispering into my ear for many years. And since it was my birthday weekend, I thought I might also bite down on the gentle mix of nostalgia and melancholia I feel for hotels I’ve loved and lost while possibly discovering a new one that ticks all of my boxes.

Specifically, even though it’s been more than thirty years since it was swept out to sea by a hurricane, I still mourn the Club at Point O’Woods. In fact, whenever I return to an Atlantic shoreline, I dream of this rambling gray-shingled beam-and-post Victorian hen of a hotel built on the brows of several grassy sand dunes overlooking the ocean in one of the most exclusive and under-the-radar summer resorts in the United States.

Point O’Woods was founded in 1894 on a stretch of pine woods and wild bayberry and beach plum scrublands on Fire Island, the long barrier island that parallels Long Island some sixty miles east of Manhattan. It was originally founded by the Chautauqua Society, a righteous Protestant group advocating a life lived around the four pillars of art, education, leisure and spirituality, but eventually became the property of a private association, which immediately made it a teetotalling private club that has variously been described as a WASP kibbutz or a Brooklyn Southampton.

Suffice it to say that it has its own private ferry from Bay Shore, New York, on the other side of the Great South Bay, and a volunteer fire department, a grocery store, a post office and a candy store. It is separated from its next-door neighbor, Ocean Bay Park, by a six-foot-high, metal-link fence with a locked door. (All “Woodsies,” as Point O’Woods’ers are disparagingly known in Ocean Bay Park, have a key to the door in the fence and are very strict about closing it quickly and firmly when they come and go, often heading to a liquor store or one of the bars or taverns in the livelier beach towns further west, because Point O’Woods is still dry and without brandishing stereotypes, WASPs are often notoriously thirsty people.)

One way or another, I had to get five social references to work here as a waiter during the summers that interspersed my sophomore and junior years at Amherst College. And though the work was a slog, especially if you got stuck scooping rock-hard ice cream at lunch, I basically lived on the beach, swimming and body surfing for hours between shifts, and then drifting off after another night of fat joint and vodka tonic partying, with veils of ocean mists cooling me on hot summer nights when they wafted through the screen window next to my bed.

Creaky, clunky, old-fashioned and only open from Memorial Day to Labor Day weekend, the Club at Point O’Woods was the essence of summer in the Northeast when it was still a seasonal celebration of simplicity, or bombing around on rusty old bicycles (there are no cars anywhere on Fire Island), eating a lot of corn on the cob and tomatoes with barbecued burgers, chicken or steaks, and dressing daily in T-shirts, cut-off shorts and flip-flops, playing tennis, getting poison ivy and scratching mosquito bites.

I was never a member of Point O’Woods, because it was a family place, but I had friends who were, including Arthur, a Park Avenue-dwelling, tennis-playing pal from college, whose family had founded a Wall Street brokerage house. He was the one I turned to when I wanted to take my sister away for a weekend before she got married the following Saturday.

“Of course, Alec. I’ll book two rooms at the Club for you.”

My sister fell as much in love with Club as I did; a week later she married—despite a last-minute flirt with Arthur’s very handsome best friend—while I returned home to France. The following summer, the Club was swept out to sea. They didn’t rebuild, because the laws now prohibited building so close to the sea, and also the model of a summer when mothers minded their children at the beach and husbands came out from New York City or some suburb on Fridays after work, had washed away like a sandcastle as the world changed and women went to work.

From the village outside of Uzès in Southern France where we live most of the time, it’s an easy and very pleasant three-hour drive on a highway that follows the trace of the Via Domitia, the road the Romans built to link Italy with Spain. From Béziers south, the white-cap tufted Mediterranean is often visible and the Pyrenees first define the horizon south of Narbonne. Despite a 1970s French government program to turn this part of Gaul’s littoral into a string of beach-resort towns that would staunch the post-war appeal of Spain to bargain-hunting holiday makers from Lille, Lyon and elsewhere, this part of the country has a reputation as being populaitre et rustre, or working-class and uncouth, and so has never appealed to Parisian tastemakers as much as such stylized precincts of the French countryside as the Luberon, Les Alpilles, Corsica and certain places in Brittany and Normandy.

This bourgeois disaffection has, however, preserved the unselfconscious authenticity of this part of France, and Perpignan, or Perpinya—the name of this city of 120,000 when it was the capital of Catalunya—is engagingly rough-around-the-edges, lively and in the midst of an accelerating renewal of its Catalan identity (this northernmost part of Catalunya became French in 1659).

Then crossing through a mostly abandoned border post and a fleet of toll booths that once took francs and pesetas but are now automated, we left one of the most isolated and economically forlorn corners of France to find ourselves in Catalunya, a thriving part of Spain that’s one of the country’s twin economic and cultural powerhouses (the other is Madrid).

Just before dusk on an autumn day, it was the tidiness of the carefully tilled dark ochre farm fields that stroked a chord in my heart, because these plots, along with all of the vegetable farms around the airport in Barcelona, tell of how deeply the Catalans love and protect their land. Shopping center-style commerce is discouraged here, because it’s considered environmentally unfriendly for an alphabet of reasons, so shops mostly edge the roads to take up as little space as possible.

Catalunya always makes me happy, because this beautiful, fertile place is instinctively hospitable, well-mannered but with a sly sense of humor, and radiates a recurring utopianism—the ivy-covered ruins of an elegant Modernista (Art-Nouveau)-style textile factory by the roadside reminding me that there was a time when beauty was gratuitous.

Arriving at the 55-room hotel, we immediately liked our double room with sea-view and terrace. It was small but immaculate with white-painted walls, an extremely comfortable bed, good lighting, a covered balcony with a table and chairs, and a sweeping view of the Mediterranean beyond the hotel’s sandy, crescent-shaped beach on a cove, where fishermen once surely mended their nets before the first vacationers arrived in the 1950s to anoint themselves with tropically vertigo-inducing coconut tanning-oil and splay out on sunbeds in search of a tobacco-colored tan. The room also came with a kettle and an espresso machine and a little minibar stocked with fairly priced stuff you might actually want to drink—vermut—or eat: a tin of anchovy-stuffed olives.

The bath had white subway tile walls, a retro pedestal sink and old-fashioned colorful stenciled tile floors. Once we’d popped the cork on a bottle of Champagne we brought along to celebrate our arrival and sipped the bracing bubbles propped up against the headboard, I knew exactly why I liked this place so much: it fed my innate and growing taste for simplicity by avoiding anything superfluous, and it was not only profoundly Catalan, but emitted a sincerity no algorithm could ever possibly coach or conjure.

The black-and-white photos in the hallways tipped the history of this place, too, depicting a simple auberge built in 1907 to accommodate the archaeologists who were excavating the adjacent Greco-Roman site of Empùries, which was founded by the Greeks in 575 B.C. The strategically located settlement thrived on trade in locally produced ceramics, olive, grain, metals and salted anchovies caught from the teeming schools just offshore. The Greek settlement was eventually subjugated by the Romans, who built their own town abutting and overlapping the Greek one.

As sea bathing became more and more popular, the workaday auberge was remodeled to cater to the gentry of Girona and other inland Catalan towns, and the Costa Brava developed the international reputation as an idyllic seaside holiday reputation it maintains to this day. More recently, the Hostal added a modern wing, a spa and a swimming pool, as well as a broad shady terrace overlooking the sea that’s a popular stopping spot for people hiking the Cami de Ronda, the 150-mile coastal trail that runs from Blanes outside of Barcelona to the French border.

Walking the length of the old wing from our room in the new one, we went down a creaky staircase of honey-colored pine and found ourselves in the heart of the original auberge. Four bar stools beckoned from a bar behind a half-moon opening in the main lounge, furnished with white-cotton slipcovered chairs. Behind the staircase there was a real library with a globe, armchairs, good lighting and shelves of books in Catalan, Spanish, French and other languages that travelers had decided to share rather than bring home after finishing them.

I find such happenstance libraries fascinating, because they offer such a window on to the quieter side of a hotel’s personality via the reading tastes of its clientele. At the Hostal, the predictable airport romance novels were few and far between, with most book spines sporting names like Gustave Flaubert, Jose Saramago, William Styron, Thomas Hardy and others, which were exciting not only as a next-up possible read, but because they suggested I just be surrounded by people who love to read as much as I do.

In the dining room with a view of the sea and several spotlit parasol pines in the gardens, I recognized a well-known Swiss art gallery owner and his wife, but otherwise the conversational soundtrack was Catalan with a sprinkling of French. There were couples dressed in black from Barcelona, a large table of noticeably polite and well-groomed teenagers having dinner with their imposing looking grandmother, and many tables of friends.

Like the Club at Point O’Woods once was for a small tribe of East Coast blue bloods, the Hostal is obviously a totemic place that’s passed down from one generation of Catalans to the next, and this explained why everyone was eating the same meal when we planned to order when we sat down for dinner: shrimp and ham croquetas, red-shrimp carpaccio, and arroz, one of the short-grained rice preparations that’s the Catalan equivalent of a New England clambake.

In the morning, the rippling sea under low leaden skies explained the hysteria of the seagull cries that woke us—the pewter-colored waters of the bay were seething with anchovies. We sipped an espresso in our big thick white robes and then another one while we read the papers on our phones, and then had to make a break for it to catch the excellent breakfast buffet, which had both the pan tomate (toast with tomato coulis, olive oil, garlic and sea salt) and tortilla espagnole (potato omelette) we were craving.

When the sun broke through the clouds, we shifted to a table on the terrace with our tablets and ordered another espresso and finally admitted to each other that our original plan to visit Cadaqués, 45 minutes away and one of the prettiest little seaside towns in Europe, and La Bisbal, a famous ceramic village, weren’t going to happen. We were just so content with our books, the sea view, and the people watching that we didn’t feel like going anywhere. 

This is what a great hotel does: it sinks its claws into you and won’t let go. Oh, to be sure, we did visit the ruins and fascinating archaeological museum just out the door, and that night, following the suggestion of a friend who works for the Roca Brothers in Girona, we went to dinner at Emporium, a Michelin one-star restaurant in nearby Castello D’Empúries.

This was an outstanding meal in a warm and earnest restaurant, where a father and his two sons—one the chef, the other the sommelier, fell all over themselves making sure we enjoyed a meal that showcased seasonal produce from within a 20-kilometer radius of the restaurant. Dishes we won’t forget from the prix-fixe menu, “Between the Sea and the Mountains,” include bread made from indigenous heirloom wheat flour produced at a local water-power mill, red shrimp from the nearby port of Roses with pickled pumpkin, orange and basil, and sea bass with zucchini, parsley roots, cockscomb, trout eggs and sea fennel. We also drank one of the best wines I’ve ever had in Spain, a Masia Carrer 2022, a vivacious white made from local cépages.

On Sunday, we’d planned to revisit the wonderful Salvadore Dali museum in Figueres, but that didn’t happen. After another lazy morning, we forced ourselves to go out to lunch at És!Carxofa in the town of Púbol, 25 minutes inland. On a warm, winey smelling day when the leaves on the vines in the surrounding vineyards had turned bronze overnight, we reached this amiable restaurant and had an excellent meal of roasted pumpkin and gorgonzola Tatin with wagyu carpaccio and chestnuts and two different arroz, creamy porcini rice with scallops, and Golany de la Balda cheese and squid rice with rock octopus and trumpet mushrooms. If it was fun to join an arty local crowd for lunch and the food was deliciously rustic; it was also a relief to return to the Hostal.

I’d fallen hard for this place, which is why we’d gradually abandoned our ambitious itinerary of museums, galleries and shops. While staying at the Hostal d’Empúries had been the original reason for our trip, it ultimately became our final destination, because being here was just so sweet. It will certainly be the destination of others in the future, too, perhaps during the winter, which is a perfect time to visit the often heaving Costa Brava, and snuggle up by a fire of crackling olive wood logs with a good book and a view of the Mediterranean through the window.