Sabadell, Terrassa and El Vallès Occidental

El Vallès Occidental is just over the hill from the city of Barcelona. In fact, the majority of the Collserola massif is not part of Barcelona but belongs to El Vallès Occidental – if you’ve got a decent pair of walking shoes, hiking there from Plaça Catalunya is not a bad way to get a picture of Barcelona and its immediate surrounds.

The comarca is very varied and, if you’re into off-the-beaten-track tourism, is well-worth visiting. Eccentrically, it’s a county with two capitals – Sabadell and Terrassa – both of which have a long and interesting history dating back to Roman times. In the 19th century, they were centres of the industrial revolution and proudly boasted that they were the Leeds and Bradford of the Mediterranean. This is not the kind of blurb that you’ll find in the average guide to Catalunya, but does give a realistic idea of what El Vallès Occidental might be like – not dissimilar to industrial English towns with a green space equivalent to the Yorkshire Dales very close by.

I work at the Universitat Autònoma in Cerdanyola, and have grown to love the place. It’s got a population of 815,000 people, who are concentrated in a number of jerry-built urban pockets. The further you get from Barcelona, the greener it gets. It’s full of Gothic architecture and fields fed by tributaries of the River Besòs, and its third most important town, Sant Cugat del Vallès, boasts one of the most important ancient monasteries in the whole of Catalunya.