Museu del Suro, Palafrugell

We went on a further tour of the Baix Empordá today. It had been very windy overnight; the sky cleared to a beautiful blue, and the wind dropped slightly, but it was very cold. Well, by our standards -- it was 10 C , but with a chill factor :)

My favourite place was the village of Rupia, a really beautiful ensemble of medieval and later buildings, on a par with Pals, but much less titivated. I couldn't stop taking photos there. But I chose this one of the cork museum in Palafrugell for my blip, because it is a bit more unusual, and it has a reflection in it. The lettering on the wall is made of ... corks of course, pushed into holes in the metal.

The museum is moderately interesting. The cork industry around here used to be huge, employing thousands of people, because there were so many manual processes involved even after mechanisation was introduced in the mid-nineteenth century. Imagine cutting individual corks by hand ...

At the end of the displays was some rather naff cork "art": tableaus made of finely shaved and carved cork. But beyond these were some genuinely creative cork artworks: mythical and biblical scenes carved into whole pieces of cork. Unfortunately there was zero information about the artist.

Edit: Thank you Google, I should have tried you before blipping. The artist is Joaquim Vicens Gironella. i'm really surprised at the lack of documentation of these beautiful works, but the museum recently reopened after renovation, and perhaps it isn't finished yet.

In Palafrugell we also discovered that there's a large and lively Sunday morning outdoor market, and virtually all the other shops are open too. We called in at a pastelleria which is obviously the place to go for your Sunday morning coffee and cake -- it was packed.

I got some pink in my blip again! It's the museum of contemporary art, which we didn't have time to visit today.