Sant Cugat del Vallès

Population: 73,439

For some reason Sant Cugat is regarded as a highly desirable place to live and its inhabitants considered rather well-to-do. This is because it’s both close enough to Barcelona for its inhabitants to take full advantage of everything the city has to offer whilst being far enough away to be able to sleep peacefully at night. Its location in the middle of the Collserola is also a great advantage making Sant Cugat, in short, a commuter heaven. An interesting statistic that the town likes to brag about is that there is one tree per 2.16 inhabitants.

The town also boasts a real piece of architectural finery in its Monastery, which dates back to 878 and during the reign of the interestingly-named Frankish king Louis the Stutterer was the most important abbey in the County of Barcelona. What you can see today is the Benedictine abbey that was built in the 12th century and combines early Romanesque and later Gothic features; it’s pure poetry in stone.

Sant Cugat also has more than its fair share of excellent festes. The Festa Major takes place around 29th June to celebrate the Sant Pere, the town’s patron saint, and there’s also a very lively Festa de Tardor, or Autumn Festival, during the first weekend of November. My favourite, though, is the Festa del Llibre Gegant, the Festival of the Giant Book, in early May when all the town’s children are invited to write a story which is published in a necessarily gigantic book.

Ajuntament de Sant Cugat, Plaça de la Vila, 1 Tel. 93 565 70 00

Tourist Office, Plaça Octavia, S/N Tel. 93 675 99 52

Original idea submitted by Marcimor

Sant Cugat del Vallès, the town where I live, is in the Vallès Occidental near to

Sabadell (twenty minutes by car). It is a big town because it has about 60.000 habitants but I live in the outskirts and my neighbourhood is very quiet and there are few people.

Furthermore, in my suburb there are a lot of green places and parks where we can play football or walk for a long time. However, if you want to buy something or eat in a restaurant you have to go at the centre of the city, which only takes only ten minutes on foot. We enjoy the Festa Major of Sant Cugat a lot. It is in June, when we have finished our classes, and the town council allows us to put up ‘barraques’, which are somewhere between a stall and a hut. So every year, in some place in the town (in a big green park with trees) we put up the barraques which are like ‘paradetes on the beach’ but the important difference is that they are run by Sant Cugat community groups such as the local football team or Els Diables. They sell alcohol and put on music. At midnight, there are concerts and, some years there are famous groups of music but when that’s not possible the groups of Sant Cugat play there. The party is until 6 o’clock in the morning, and then the police start to throw the people out. Now I’m 18 and I can drive, so I can see that the worst thing about Sant Cugat is driving. There are a lot of places to park but you’ll never find a place for your car. There is a lot of traffic and it’s very stressful.Moreover, when I was 15 years old, me and my friends always went to parks and green spaces with a ball or to a little forest where we used to build dens. Now, though, in the last three years there has been a lot of building, and flats and houses occupy the spaces where we used to play. We can see that, they are building on the green spaces and in the future, Sant Cugat will be ugly and sad.

However, now it’s still a good place to live with pretty places and nice people. I like living here but I don’t think that I will live there in the future, I think I’ll live in a town near just outside Sant Cugat because if you want to buy a flat in Sant Cugat you have to pay much too much.