Sitges

People have lived here for at least 50,000 years: Neanderthal bones and stone tools have been found in the Cova del Gegant, a cave near the town. A Roman villa stood at the Vinyet hermitage, and the name Sitges is the Catalan plural for silos, after the grain stores around which the first town grew. In the Middle Ages a castle on the walled headland of the Baluard belonged to the bishopric of Barcelona, which ceded it to Count Mir Geribert in 1041. The Sitges family held the town from the 12th century until 1308, when Agnes of Sitges sold it to Bernat de Fonollar; after his death it passed to the Pia Almoina, a charitable institution, which held it until 1814.

From the late 18th century to the early 20th, thousands of young people from Sitges went to eastern Cuba, mostly to work in trade. Facundo Bacardí, founder of the rum company, was among those who did well there; others came home rich, built Caribbean-looking houses with palm trees and became known as Americanos. Wine was the economy until 1874, when the first mechanised shoe factory in Spain opened here, and shoemaking shaped the economy through the first third of the 20th century.

Santiago Rusiñol set up his studio at Cau Ferrat in the late 19th century, and artists followed; the American collector Charles Deering, who kept his art collection here from 1910 to 1921, built the Maricel palace, and Barcelona families laid out the Terramar garden city. The town was held by the Republic for most of the Civil War. In 1958 Colombia's political leaders signed the Declaration of Sitges here. In the 1960s it became a centre of the counterculture under Franco, and tourism replaced shoemaking.

Sitges built its reputation on art. Santiago Rusiñol's summers here in the late 19th century drew other painters and writers, and xató, the town's dish, was first recorded at a meal of Rusiñol's circle in 1896. G. K. Chesterton visited in 1926 and 1935, and in the 1960s the town became known as "Ibiza in miniature". Today it is often described as the gay capital of Europe, with a dense cluster of gay-friendly bars, restaurants and hotels, and Carnival, Pride and Bear Week as its key events.

The town's year is a run of festivals. Carnival has been celebrated for more than a century, from the arrival of King Carnestoltes on Fat Thursday to the burial of the sardine on Ash Wednesday, with two night-time parades of around forty floats. Corpus Christi in June is a festival with six centuries of history, the Festa Major for Saint Bartholomew in August brings castells, traditional dances and fireworks, the smaller Santa Tecla festival follows in September, and in October the Sitges Film Festival, founded in 1968, fills the town with fans of fantasy and horror cinema.

Alongside the tourism, Sitges remains a traditional Catalan town, and the two worlds coexist easily. Motor racing has a history here too: the banked Terramar circuit opened in 1923, and a vintage car rally from Barcelona has arrived every March since 1959.

About 32,600 people lived in Sitges in 2025. Around a third of permanent residents are estimated to be foreigners, most of them from northern Europe, and the town has French and English-language schools and a campus of the British School of Barcelona in Vallpineda. Its setting by the sea, the Garraf Natural Park around it and its closeness to Barcelona's airport have pushed property prices towards those of Europe's most expensive cities, and it has been called the Saint-Tropez of Spain.

The economy rests on tourism and culture: the town has more than 4,500 hotel beds, half of them in four-star hotels. Nine of its beaches and two marinas regularly earn the Blue Flag, and since breakwaters and ports were built from 1956 the beaches have grown considerably. Life follows the seasons: summer crowds and festival weekends, quieter winters when the town belongs to its residents. Shops are allowed to open on Sundays, and the pedestrian streets fill on Sunday afternoons with visitors from Barcelona.

Xató is the dish of Sitges. Its heart is the sauce, made with almonds, hazelnuts, breadcrumbs, vinegar, garlic, olive oil, salt and the dried nyora pepper, served over an endive salad with anchovy, tuna and dried salted cod. Sitges is one of the towns on the "Xató Route", each with its own recipe, and xatonades, xató meals served with assorted omelettes, are part of Carnival.

Malvasia, a delicate sweet wine served mainly with dessert, is the town's traditional wine; its name comes from the Greek port of Monemvasia. The town's Hospital of Sant Joan Baptista still produces it by the traditional method from its own vines, selling some 4,000 bottles a year for charity.

The town also claims the first beach bar in Spain. El Kiosket opened on the seafront in 1913, and in 1949 the journalist César González Ruano renamed it a chiringuito, after the stocking used to strain coffee in Cuba — the word now used for beach bars across Spain. The streets near the waterfront are still full of street cafés.