Last Updated on 29 April 2024 by gerry

There are still a few towns and many beaches in Maresme country, which we have yet to visit. Today we set off for Premià de Mar on a mission to take a look at the town, have some time on one of its beaches and then walk north to the next town of Vilassar de Mar.

It’s is midday Friday and the start of a holiday weekend as May Day (on Monday) is a public holiday here. As the train pulls into Caldes d’Estrac our carriage is filled with a few dozen schoolchildren. We remain unclear where they are all headed together as they are still on the train as we reach our destination of Premià de Mar.

This town has a lovely pedestrianised tree-lined Riera leading to its Gran Via (parallel to the coast). We take a right and explore some of the shops, buying some things for a beach picnic and our tea later tonight. Eventually we reach the Carretera de Vilassar de Dalt which is the busy main road that takes us back down to the town’s marina on the coast.

The marina is chock-a-block full of eateriesf and shops and appears much busier that what we’ve seen in the likes of Port Balís at Sant Andreu de Llavaneres. We keep walking northwards to find a suitable beach for a couple of hours in the sun. The beach we find is Platja de Llevant, a name also used for a few other beaches including one in Barcelona and more or less means “laid back beach”. We’ve already seen on our train journey here that many beaches are relatively busy, so it was an extremely pleasant surprise to discover how few people were using this very long beach.

The swimming conditions were fabulous, almost dead calm, with a gentle gradient into the depths of the sea here. We started off with a swim together and stayed in for longer than we done before. Once we got through the initial shock of the cold seawater, it felt really quite comfortable. You can see the beach in the picture above with a southbound Rodalies train showing just how closely the R1 train tracks follow the coastline.