Lleida

Lerida — Lleida, in the Catalan form the register should carry, flagged for the workbook — climbs to the strangest and grandest of Catalonia's cathedrals. The Seu Vella crowns the city hill entire: a thirteenth-century cathedral of the transition, its octagonal bell tower a landmark across the plain, its cloister — uniquely — flung open on the precipice side, Gothic arcades framing the huerta below like a loggia built for the view. Turned into a barracks for two centuries after 1707 and reconquered by restoration, it is the city's crown and conscience in one monument, with the later Seu Nova serving the liturgy downhill.

Lleida's plain is Spain's orchard in the statistics — pears, apples and stone fruit in industrial poetry — and the city's most beloved festival is gastronomic and gastropodous: the Aplec del Caragol, Europe's greatest snail feast, when two hundred thousand portions of caragols meet the colles' bonhomie on the river meadows each May, a Guinness-scaled communion of garlic and brotherhood. The Sant Anastasi festivities add giants and the moros i cristians of the west. Musical life runs from the conservatory tradition to the touring seasons at the modern theatre-auditorium, atop the register the concert record describes. A cloister over the void, a hundred tonnes of snails: Lleida's appetites are vertical and horizontal alike.