Castellfollit de la Roca: An 'explosive' village where you need a head for heights

PROBABLY not the best place to live if you suffer from vertigo, but ideal if you want an unrivalled view from your lounge window, taking a wrong turning out of Castellfollit de la Roca could be the last mistake you'll ever make. For your Facebook cover picture, though, it's perfect.

Residents in the 'explosive' village in the La Garrocha (La Garrotxa, in catalán) district of the province of Girona know all about living on the edge: Their long, thin municipality is balanced on a ledge with a sheer drop on either side of over 50 metres (164 feet).

The actual site of the village was formed through erosion from the rivers Fluvià and Toronell on the remains of lava currents, frozen in time following volcanic eruptions approximately 200,000 years ago, creating a ridge of about a kilometre in length.

In fact, Castellfollit de la Roca is home to the only active basalt (cooled lava) mine in Spain, which is still being exploited – it has been in the hands of the Ortiz family since 1929, and the rock is used as building material.

And actually, the majority of its houses are made from volcanic rock.

But whose decision was it to construct an entire village along the ridge in the first place?

According to the town hall, its origins are Mediaeval, which would make sense: It was a time when being hard to reach by enemy invaders, and high enough up to be able to spot them long before they arrived, carried more weight when designing your dream home than a south-facing terrace and a heated swimming pool.

Zip forward 1,000 years or so, and such a strategic location is also a handy way of making sure no invasive building development pops up to spoil the view or lead to overpopulation and a strain on public services; there simply isn't room for either.

At less than a square kilometre in size (logically, looking at its shape) – 670,000 square metres, to be precise, or 166 acres – it's one of the smallest villages, by land mass, in Spain; not the number-one smallest, since that award goes to Emperador, just north of Valencia, which is also the most densely-populated with one resident for every 48 square metres.

Although Castellfollit is quite densely-populated itself – with 961 inhabitants in a stretch of one kilometre in length and between two and four houses wide, it means one person for every 697 square metres, which is fairly tightly-packed, without going to Emperador's extreme.

Due to its size and being difficult to reach, over the last 20 or 30 years, the village has gone through an 'industrial involution' – locals having to leave to find work as traditional trades died out.

But it has become a tourist attraction, for obvious reasons, meaning it is unlikely to ever suffer the kind of rural exodus currently faced by many of Spain's remotest countryside municipalities.

As well as the views, the picturesque old town – which has barely changed since its origins – visitor sights include the 13th-century San Salvador church, which is now used as a community centre and art gallery rather than for mass, plus the sausage museum (free to enter, including sausage-tasting) in homage to one of its now nearly-defunct industries, and the Vietnam museum, said to be unique in Europe: A private collection in a public place, it's stocked with military uniforms, equipment, pieces of ordnance and other memorabilia from the devastating war in the south-east Asian country in the 1960s.

Also, like many of Spain's smallest towns and villages, Castellfollit de la Roca has all the local services you need within its diminutive size, right through to a sports centre with an outdoor pool, a book shop and a furniture shop.

Castellfollit de la Roca is thought to have been named either after a castle nearby, or because the volcanic ridge looked like a castle in terms of shape; follit relates to leaves, and is thought to have been because the lava 'tongues' that make up its landscape were leaf-shaped.

'De la Roca' ('of the rock') was a recent suffix, to differentiate the village from two others in Catalunya with the same root name – Castellfollit de Riubregós and Castellfollit del Boix.

If you're hoping to visit one day and don't want to get confused and end up in the wrong town, the 'cliff-edge Castellfollit' is close to Olot (7.5 kilometres away), towards the north of the province of Girona, and a good hour's drive inland from the Costa Brava.

These days, it's not that difficult to get to – not like when it was first built. From Olot, take the N-260, which leads straight to it; ditto from Figueres, 37 kilometres away; from Girona city, take the C-66 as far as Besalú and then the N-260. And that's it.

And it's very worth the (long) detour, even if you've no head for heights – just stick to the main street, don't accept invites to tea parties in back gardens, and don't look down.

The first photograph, above, is by Sam Zucker on Instagram ('zuckerandspice'); the second is by the tourism network Poblacions de Catalunya (poblacions_de_catalunya), and the third is from Castellfollit de la Roca town hall website, taken by Pep Callís.