AT A GLANCE
Why go?
Can Palomeres crowns a wooded hillside on the coast of the Maresme, where the towns of Pineda de Mar and Malgrat de Mar meet. It is one of those quiet Catalan corners where three stories overlap: a ruined centuries-old farmhouse, the mouths of long-abandoned iron mines, and a protected bat habitat tucked into the hillside. For walkers and curious explorers it offers an atmospheric off-the-beaten-track stop rather than a polished monument.↗↗
What gives the place its character is the contrast between the melancholy silhouette of an old masia and the industrial archaeology beside it—tunnels, a loading station and the ghost of a cableway that once swung iron ore out to ships anchored offshore, all now wrapped in forest and home to one of Catalonia's most biodiverse colonies of bats.↗↗
A ruined masia with a stone watchtower
The heart of the site is Can Palomeres itself, a farmhouse of medieval origin whose first documentary mention dates to 1288. It took its classic shape in the sixteenth century as a three-naved Catalan masia and was enlarged in the eighteenth, then abandoned in the 1970s, leaving it in a deliberately picturesque state of ruin.
