Day 4: Settling Into Sitges
Day 4 was the first day with nothing on the schedule. Not a loose day, not a buffer day — nothing. No train to catch, no museum to time-slot, no map running in the background. Just Sitges and whatever it wanted to show me. I had arrived the night before and gotten a first impression in the dark, which is its own kind of knowing, but waking up in a place is different from arriving in it. The hotel had a terracotta patio with palm trees and a view of rooftops going down toward the water. Stood out there with coffee before nine in the morning thinking: I could do this for a while. Bear Week had not officially started yet, so the town was in its quieter version of itself. Not sleepy — Sitges is never sleepy — but not yet at full volume either.
I walked. No destination, no time limit. Found the waterfront, found the market, poked into shops selling things I did not need and considered buying anyway. Did the thing where you pretend you live somewhere you do not live, and let yourself get comfortable in the pretense. Sitges is easy to pretend about. The streets are narrow and old, the buildings are white and terracotta, and the whole place has a human scale that Madrid — for all its beauty — does not have. Here, you can see across the whole town from a slight elevation. Everything connects to everything else within a ten-minute walk. That intimacy matters.
The church tower was visible from almost everywhere in town, and I kept looking up at it. The Church of Sant Bartomeu i Santa Tecla sits on a headland above the beach, and from certain angles it looks like it is the thing holding Sitges together — the fixed point that all the lanes and alleys radiate away from. It has been there since the 17th century, watching the town change underneath it. Now it watches over a place that is equal parts ancient Catalan village and one of the most welcoming LGBTQ+ destinations in Europe, and it manages to look like it approves of the whole arrangement.
Walked up to the overlook at the base of the church. The Mediterranean stretched out below, flat and that particular unreasonable blue. The rooftops of the old town tumbled down the hillside toward the water in a way that made the whole thing look composed, like someone arranged it. Took thirty photos from this spot. None of them captured what it felt like to stand there. That seems right, actually. Some things resist the camera.
The Promenade
Late afternoon, the promenade. This is where I started understanding what makes Sitges different from other beach towns. It is not the beaches — they are fine, good even, but not extraordinary by Mediterranean standards. It is the promenade itself. The path runs along the coast with palm trees on one side and open water on the other, and in the late afternoon the light turns warm and soft and everything it touches looks like the good version of itself. Families walking. Old men on benches. Couples. A dog running toward the water and then stopping exactly at the edge, as if it had been told not to.
Took a selfie because I wanted proof of how it felt to be there with nowhere to be and nothing to do and an entire evening still ahead. The answer, if I had to describe it: like I had made the right decision.
Dinner and the Night
Found a restaurant that evening that served bao buns, and I need to spend a moment on these bao buns. Crispy pork belly, pickled toppings, a sauce I would have genuinely considered committing a minor crime to take home in a jar. I have eaten bao buns in a lot of places. I have eaten them in actual dedicated bao restaurants where that is the entire menu and the chef has presumably been perfecting their pork belly technique for years. These were better. There is no logical reason they should have been better — we are talking about a side-street restaurant in a small Catalan beach town — but they were, and I have thought about them since. Ordered a second round. Would have ordered a third if I had any dignity left. I did not order a third.
Ordered a noodle dish after the bao buns because at that point I had completely abandoned the idea of moderation. Rich, savory, exactly what you eat when you have decided that calories do not exist on this particular vacation. Then I spotted a rotisserie chicken place on the walk back to the hotel and genuinely considered a third dinner. Stood there looking at the chickens spinning in the window for longer than I should admit. I did not go in. But I thought about it. Spain keeps doing something to my relationship with food and I have stopped resisting it.
After dinner, the town shifted. The narrow lanes lit up. Warm light spilled out of bars and restaurants, and the streets that had been quiet in the afternoon were now full. The church on the headland lit from below, glowing against the night sky — same building, completely different presence. Found a place with tables on the sidewalk, ordered a sangria, sat with it for a while watching people pass. Everyone moved at the pace of somewhere they were happy to be. Nobody was rushing.
Bear Week was still a few days off. Banners were going up on the light poles. Bars had their event schedules posted in the windows. The town was getting ready for something it has been getting ready for every September for decades, and the anticipation was already in the air — quiet but present, like the energy before a concert when the crowd knows the lights are about to go down.
Got back to the hotel late and stood on the patio one more time. The same terracotta and palms that I had stood in that morning with coffee, but the night made it different — quieter, more settled. I thought: this is it. Not the palaces or the museums, not the paintings or the high-speed trains — although all of those were extraordinary. This. A day with no agenda that became exactly what I needed. Sitges was already working on me, and I had not even gotten to the main event yet.
