The most logical thing would be to kick off with the province of Barcelona, which houses Catalonia's eponymous, world-famous capital city. But who wants to do the logical thing? So we're going to start with Catalonia's least known and probably least visited province, Lleida.

The first thing you notice when you cross over into Lleida is that the relatively lush landscapes of eastern Catalonia instantly turn into a series of bumpy yellow fields topped off here and there with struggling clumps of greenery. Indeed, until fairly recently, Lleida was the poorest of Catalonia's provinces, with high levels of emigration (usually to Latin America) and a hand- to-mouth existence for those who remained; the novel 'Stone In a Landslide' by Maria Barbal (Peirene Press, 2010) describes the toughness of early 20th century Lleida life to a T.

But nowadays Lleida is doing better than well, thanks to a thriving outdoor sports industry, several ski stations, a burgeoning of cultural events, and the discovery by outsiders of the beauty of many of the province's towns, to say nothing of its highly successful fruit industry.

The city of Lleida itself is best-known for the old cathedral or Seu Vella, mainly because you can't help seeing it from anywhere in the town, ensconced as it has been on the crest of a tall hill since the 13th century. Much of the rest of Lleida city, however, is modern going on plain-looking, as it was largely rebuilt during the Franco period – not known for the quality of its architecture - it having been devastated in the Spanish Civil War: indeed, it was hit worse then Gernika, the entire city being bombed in relentless waves by both German and Italian planes, with hundreds of civilian casualties, an atrocity which, however, somehow didn’t get onto Picasso’s radar. Some of the fine Old Town still survives, and is home to the city's culturally active Roma community.

Every year Lleida is host to what for me is something close to a nightmare: the annual, international 'Aplec del Caragol' or 'Snail Gathering', at which up to two hundred thousand people feast on these (I repeat: for me) revolting little gastropods towards the end of May. A little south of Lleida is an interesting village called Llardecans - literally, 'Home of the Dogs' - which I would never have discovered if I hadn't been invited to present a book there. I assumed that this presentation would be a modest affair and found myself with an audience of over a hundred: the farmers of Llardecans - and almost everyone there is involved in farming one way or the other - take their culture seriously, organising as they do several regular literary and musical events every year. It also houses one of Europe's very few untouched 19th century pharmacies, a dark, eerie yet fascinating place full of vials, phials and preserved concoctions most of which looked like shattered coral.

Maybe the best way to see much of Lleida province is to take the Lleida-Pirineus train, which crawls north through the agreeable town of Balaguer, hugging mountainsides, its windows overlooking a river that twice merges into vast lakes that glimmer and glint and sometimes twinkle as you continue on to the austere, yellow-stoned town of Tremp, famous for a pencil- thin sausage called a 'xolis', and where, not coincidentally, there is an annual charcuterie festival, held just a week before the horde at the Aplec del Caragol start chomping on their snails. The train ends up at an unprepossessing village called Pobla de Segur, from which you can head north-east to the town of Sort, surrounded by mountains, or north-west to a curious canton called the Vall d’Aran – the Aran Valley - where you will find yourself listening to a lisping language which is neither Catalan nor Spanish and which the natives call Aranese but which is in point of fact a variant of Occitan: the language that used to be spoken all over southern France.

The gastronomic speciality of most of northern Lleida – and served just about everywhere - is a delicious wild boar stew ('civet de senglar’).

To the south of the province are three more interesting places. A town called Agramunt, which specialises in making round and teeth-threateningly hard nougat biscuits (one of
the buildings there is shaped like one of these things). Nearby is Cervera, an attractive place with an anomalously large 18th century building that usually makes first-time visitors do a double-take, so incongruous does it look in this quiet town of just under 10,000 inhabitants. The building is a punishment: after the Catalans lost the War of Secession in 1714 against the Bourbon monarchy, the victorious King Philip V closed all the Catalan universities and built this one in the then all but inaccessible Cervera, thus effectively hamstringing Catalan tertiary education for over a century. Near Cervera is Tàrrega, pleasantly sleepy except in the second 7 week of September, when it hosts a festival of street theatre that attracts hundreds of acts from the five continents and thousands upon thousands of visitors from all over Europe.

And we haven’t so much as mentioned other places well worth visiting, such as the multi-coloured town of Seu d’Urgell (close to the Andorran border) or the spectacular Natural Park of Aigüestortes or the little-visited but highly attractive medieval town of Solsona or... 

The cantons of Lleida province have an austere, dry feel to them, as if you were roughing it a bit simply by being there. But once you start to travel around the area, it gets pleasanter and pleasanter. The inhabitants call their home ‘The Firm Land’ (‘La Terra Firma’). Just so.