The Call of Girona: Catalonia's Best-Preserved Jewish Quarter

The Call's layout survives almost unchanged: covered passages, internal courtyards and stone stairways connect houses that once held the community's synagogue, study houses and baths. The centrepiece is the Bonastruc ça Porta centre, built around the site believed to have housed Girona's main synagogue, which now presents the history of Catalan Jewry through original documents, funerary inscriptions recovered from the nearby Montjuïc cemetery, and reconstructed domestic interiors.

Girona's Jewish community, documented from the ninth century, grew into one of medieval Catalonia's most important, contributing significantly to the development of Kabbalah under Rabbi Moses ben Nahman, known as Nahmanides or Ramban, in the thirteenth century. The Call was formally enclosed as a segregated quarter in the fourteenth century, and the community endured attacks in 1391 before its final dissolution with the 1492 expulsion order extended across the Crown of Aragon.

Girona was one of the principal centres of Jewish mystical thought in medieval Europe, and Nahmanides, physician, biblical commentator and halakhic authority, is its most celebrated figure. His public disputation with the convert Pablo Christiani, held in Barcelona in 1263 before King James I of Aragon, remains one of the best-documented Jewish-Christian debates of the period, and it is discussed at length in the Bonastruc ça Porta's permanent exhibition.

Girona is paired with Barcelona and Besalú on our fourteen-day route through Catalonia, walked on foot with a private guide through the Call's covered lanes and the Bonastruc ça Porta centre, timed to avoid the midday coach groups that arrive from the coast.