Dotted around the town of La Bispal d’Emoporda, the tall slender chimneys of old ceramics factories have become local landmarks. The basis for the ceramic-making industry there is the large deposits of clay in the subsoil.
La Bispal d'Emporda Produces Wide Variety of Ceramics
Today La Bisbal d'Emporda is famed internationally for producing a wide variety of ceramics from traditional earthenware and decorative pottery to paving tiles, garden pots and building materials. In addition it is the home of many supporting industries supplying materials, machinery and equipment to the local factories and ovens.
Large flower pots and tiles in many colours and statues, as well as statues of all shapes and sizes, are displayed outside the many pottery shops near the Tourist Office along Carrer de l'Aigueta.
Pottery Hypermarkets
On the edge of La Bispal d’Emporda, pottery hypermarkets sell everything from fountains big enough for a stately home or even a town centre to brightly coloured bowls and tiny ceramic animals. Lifesize statues of Roman-style centurions and shapely maidens stand shoulder to shoulder beside vast arrays of garden pots and ornaments, some of them antiques.
The Tourist Office can arrange visits to potters' workshops, though the Terracotta Museum which has over 6,000 exhibits is currently being refurbished and not due to reopen until 2012.
Antiques Centre
Resulting from the growth of the ceramics industry, La Bisbal d'Emoporda has also become a major antiques centre. When ceramics brought great wealth to the area in the 18th and 19th centuries, many families furnished their homes in grand style. Then in the 1960s, when old furniture and other antique items became fashionable again, workshops opened to restore them.
Now La Bisbal d'Emoporda has several antique shops with items coming from all over Catalonia. There are also regular antiques markets held in nearby Palafrugell.
The area's history comes alive in a dramatic audiovisual, Land and Blood: Feudal Warfare in Emporda County, which can be viewed at the Tourist Office.
Castell Palau
At the heart of the old town, the Castell Palau, built by the bishops of Girona, is a fine example of Catalan civil architecture from the 11th and 12th centuries. It was enlarged in the 14th century with the addition of the outer wall and other buildings and further altered in the 16th and 17th.
So altogether La Bispal d’Emporda is an interesting place to visit with every likelihood of coming away with an attractive piece of pottery as a lasting souvenir.
Gillian Thomas - Having left the BBC's Paris news office to return to England and get married over 20 years ago, I have freelanced as a journalist ever ...
