Getaway to Bages: Treasures of Cardona and Súria

There’s a lot of mató, the local version of curd cheese, on the menu here. It’s served with honey, with chocolate, and with cream caramel pudding. It’s also included in the tomato salad along with olive paste. This now emblematic restaurant in this renowned mató producing village lies almost within touching distance of the sacred mountain of Montserrat. Roger Costa, the owner’s brother, is one of the four craftsmen in the village who make mató, which is sold under the Can Florí brand name. The restaurant offers home-style cooking with an oak charcoal grill. For Barça fans there is El racó del culer. Also serving hearty cooked breakfasts and calçotades (grilled scallions).

The owners of this Manresa-based restaurant say that what they want is to offer quality dishes at reasonable prices with good service. To do so, they have a young but well-trained team, and a dining room with waiter service and a buffet (every lunchtime, including public holidays, and Friday and Saturday evening). If you prefer to choose from the menu, you will find excellent meat and fish dishes made with local ingredients.  

At the gates of Sant Llorenç de Munt Natural Park, Les Voltes de Talamanca restaurant has excellent views from its terrace – a great place for breakfast or an aperitif ‒ and an intimate and cosy dining room. It offers daily and weekend set menus, with quality traditional dishes. You can order the roast rabbit, cod with 'samfaina' vegetable sauce or grilled chicken leg, to mention just a few of the main courses.  

This tavern is one of the traditional meeting places in Ribes and a place with plenty of history (the building dates from the 19th century). It has served plenty of good food and drink over the years and has been closely associated with the cultural and associative life of the town. It’s an informal place where you can order tapas and open toasted sandwiches, which are the speciality of the house, as well as a fine selection of local wines. La Premsa also holds dinners featuring wine matching and art exhibitions.

As the name of this restaurant suggests, here you can eat pasta and pizza. But much more besides. Raviolo serves excellent dishes of black rice, cod and duck as well as seasonal produce and top quality pasta made daily in their own workshop in the center of the capital of Bages.

Since the 19th century, Ca l'Arturo has been home to all kinds of agricultural activities typical of its rural area. In fact, it is still surrounded by forests, orchards and fields. Although it is part of the Can Carné farm, years ago it was restored and today is a country house with accommodation for about ten people with a games room, swimming pool, garden and barbecue. This is what you need if you are looking for a spacious and comfortable place to spend the weekend in good company.

The old barnyard of a 500-year-old manor house, which was renovated from top to bottom, is now a phenomenal rural lodge, available to rent in its entirety or by rooms. And it offers a number of additional features​​, such as the fact that you have a traditional Catalan restaurant in the same building, allowing you, if you wish, to stay on a half board or full board basis. You can also visit the wine cellar where there are new wine vats and old oak barrels from the fourteenth century. The house has five bedrooms, three doubles and two quadruple rooms.

A simple, family guesthouse in the middle of Montserrat Natural Park. Ideal for excursions through the holy mountain and, also, to switch off for a few days spellbound by the panoramic views. The restaurant serves modern and seasonal Catalan cuisine, particularly using local products.  

Known for many years as the Hostal del Camp, today it is a four-star hotel with a restaurant serving traditional and local cuisine. It has swimming pools and gardens, ideal whether you go with children or if you want to organise a special celebration. In peaceful surroundings and offering many possibilities for active tourism nearby.  

This beautiful hotel in Cardona is the result of the conversion of a convent school, occupying a building dating from the 19th century and run by the Vedrunes Carmelites. Carefully decorated in clear and pastel colours, Bremon is an oasis of calm, with 19 comfortable rooms and a number of apartments. Its cosy café serves crepes, sandwiches and cheese boards.

The Scenic Arts Centre in Manresa has a busy schedule that includes performances in various genres, as well as education in the scenic arts and a bar-restaurant. It’s set in a noucentista-style building from the 1920s that was closed in 1980 and reopened in 2007 as a theatre and concert hall. The main hall has seating for 8,000 spectators, while the smaller one seats 200. It's managed by the Galliner association and attracts some 75,000 spectators every year.

The hero of the great Catalan defeat of 1714, head councillor Rafael Casanova, was born in this house to a rich family in 1660 and it's changed very little since then. The house already existed in the 16th century, but the Casanova family bought and renovated it in the 17th century. Look out for the Gothic window and the 18th-century Ester Cycle paintings. It also houses an exhibition on Casanova's historical period, the town, his life and his ancestry, as well as the municipal archives and the Moia county museum. The centre belongs to the Museu d’Història de Catalunya network.

The cultural and recreational complex run by the Fundació Catalunya – La Pedrera near Manresa invites you to savour it slowly: the Romanesque monastery of Sant Benet de Bages, the Alicia Foundation, the ecological market gardens, the hotel with three restaurants, one with a Michelin star, and spaces for events and meetings. In brief: art, cuisine and nature for all ages, tastes, and budget, tied up together in a beautiful ribbon since 2007.

Something new and difficult to explain. Abstract, but palpable. And very expanisve: it covers a whole region. But what on earth is a geopark? It's a geological and mining park, an outdoor museum that covers almost all the municipalities in Bages, as well as Collbató (Baix Llobregat Nord), with five information points and nine centres: the Salpetre caves, the Toll caves, Montserrat, Sant Llorenç, La Culla, Súria, the Valentí Masachs Geology Museum, Sallent and Cardona. It's covered by two routes: from Moià to Cardona and from Moià to Collbató.

This is the last bit of the Principality that succumbed to the Bourbons in 1714. A refuge for the viscounts, earls, and dukes of Cardona for seven centuries – kings uncrowned by the 'white gold' (salt), the castle is an imposing place with two great treasures: the divine Romanesque collegiate church of Sant Vicenç and the Minyona tower. A Gothic cloister was added, as were 17th-century bulwarks. The castle also boasts an inn, recently made into a museum, all of which make up the monument that is the History Museum of Catalonia, with all that entails.

This museum never takes a day off. It shows the cream of the crop of the abbey’s heritage, gathered from the Napoleonic devastation. The museum opened in 1963, but its contents date back to 1911, with objects from the monk Bonaventura Ubach’s expedition to the Middle East. The modernista rooms from Puig i Cadalfalch feature, over two floors, both old and contemporary paintings from the 19th and 20th centuries, Byzantine icons, jewellery, archaeological pieces from the biblical world, and Nigra Sum, about the adventures of the Virgin of Montserrat.