Getaways

In 2008, the Maria Àngels Anglada - Carles Fages de Climent Literary Heritage Chair at the University of Girona and the Gavarres Consortium created a route that reflects on the relationship between Mercè Rodoreda and Romanyà de la Selva, where she spent her final days and which inspired her later works.

 

Mercè Rodoreda described the village of Romanyà de la Selva, in the Baix Empordà, as “sensational”, a place where “the houses are quite far away from each other”, said the author. That’s because this small town, which belongs to the municipality of Santa Cristina d’Aro, is located in the Sierra de las Gavarres, a natural space where Rodoreda spent the last eleven years of her life and was a long way from her native Barcelona, from Paris, where she was first exiled, and Geneva afterwards. A town that the most prominent Catalan writer of the 20th century depicted in some of her final works, such as Broken Mirror, So much war... and Travels and flowers.

 

The route, organised by the Maria Àngels Anglada - Carles Fages de Climent Literary Heritage Chair at the University of Girona and the Gavarres Consortium, proposes a self-guided itinerary through the corners that served as a backdrop for Rodoreda between 1972, the year she returned to Catalonia from exile, and 1983, when she died.

 

It begins in the Plaza de la Rectoria and is a one-and-a-half hour route that works its way through the key locations of her life in Romanyà: the Les Gavarres refuge and restaurant, where she spent her first few nights in the village; el Senyal Vell, the house owned by Carme Manrubia, a friend of Rodoreda, where the writer lived during her first years in Romanyà de la Selva and where she wrote and finished her works; the Mirandes viewpoint, the forest that so inspired her; the dolmen of the Cueva d’en Daina; and the village cemetery, where she is buried and where we can find a bust of her. The visit to these spaces is complemented by numerous excerpts from her books, which bear witness to how Rodoreda put the landscape around her into words. In her novel Aloma, she already said that “things were beautiful, life not so much”.

 

Her garden, the holm oaks of Las Gavarres and the general atmosphere of Romanyà de la Selva are essential elements for understanding the final part of Mercè Rodoreda’s work, which turned the physical environment into a literary environment where she could reflect her latest stories, eternally marked by the flowers in her childhood garden, and which she pursued for a lifetime.

 

The Mercè Rodoreda route explores the literary geography of the writer from twelve key points in the town, which are already part of the literary history of Catalonia.