A little more Spain

I did promise one more post on the topic--and still have some fairly good pictures--so here goes.

The best sightseeing of the trip was, as noted, in Empuries, which the Michelin Green Guide gives two stars. There was originally a Greek fort on a little island, then a larger Greek town on the mainland, with a port created when the separation between island and mainland silted up, then a Roman city just inland from the Greek one. We spent a beautiful sunny day wandering through Greek ruins in the morning and Roman ones in the afternoon. There is a good statue of Aesculapius in the Greek ruins--a copy of one found there and whisked off to a museum.

Since it isn't full tourist season yet the cafe on the archaeological site wasn't open so in between our bouts of sightseeing we walked along the beach to Sant Marti d'Empuries, an existing town on the site of the first Greek settlement. It looked (I suppose not surprisingly) more like the towns we saw in Greece than like the others on the Costa Brava. Instead of facing the Mediterranean, it had a small central square with a church on one side and a cluster of restaurants on the other. We chose the cheaper restaurant and ate very well--capping a salad-oriented lunch with a shared dessert of a crepe with figs and cream, shown here.

Then back to archeology--the Roman city was very impressive with the remains of imposing houses and some lovely floor mosaics. There were some good mosaic "pictures" in the little local museum as well.

If we get a chance to go back to this part of Spain I think we'd do it in a flash.