Tossa de Mar: The Walled Vila Vella and the Camí de Ronda

Tossa de Mar has the only fortified medieval town still standing on the whole Catalan coast — 12th-century walls with three cylindrical towers running down to the sea, enclosing a knot of lanes on a headland. The Costa Brava got its reputation in the 1960s and has spent decades living it down, but the 214 kilometres between Blanes and the French border are genuinely rugged, and the Camí de Ronda that runs along them was a coastguard and smugglers' path long before it was a walking route. Marc Chagall came here in the 1930s and called it a blue paradise.