The coastline had no name until 1908. That year the Catalan journalist Ferran Agulló, writing in La Veu de Catalunya, christened the shore north of Blanes the Costa Brava — the rugged coast — and the phrase attached itself to some 200 kilometres of pine, granite and inlet running north to the French border. A Costa Brava day tour with boat trip from Barcelona covers only a narrow southern fraction of that length. It is, however, the fraction where the geology reads most clearly: Palaeozoic rock split by the tramuntana wind, cut into calas too small for a road and reachable, for centuries, only by hull. Fishing built these towns and tourism rebuilt them, usually within a single generation. Tossa de Mar keeps the Vila Vella, the only fortified medieval settlement still standing on the Catalan coast, its walls raised between 1187 and 1387, three cylindrical towers still holding the headland above the sand. Marc Chagall worked there through the summer of 1934. Lloret de Mar, a few kilometres south, was rebuilt with indiano fortunes carried home from Cuba and spent on churches and cemeteries across Girona province. The cork trade faded and the coral divers stopped; the coves stayed, and Costa Brava day tour with boat trip from Barcelona tickets now follow water once crossed for cargo. Design arrived deliberately. From 1924 the Girona modernista Rafael Masó laid out S'Agaró for the industrialist Josep Ensesa — a planned seaside town of whitewashed villas set above the Camí de Ronda, the cliff path first walked by customs officers watching for contrabandistes. Offshore, the Illes Medes became a marine reserve in 1983, and its posidonia meadows and resident grouper explain why snorkel-led Costa Brava boat tours and kayak routes concentrate where they do. Most Costa Brava day tour with boat trip from Barcelona tours run north along the same corridor, passing Sant Feliu de Guíxols and Calella de Palafrugell. What remains is a working shoreline rather than a monument. Boats still leave the ramps; the water over the sea-grass reads green rather than blue. The value of a Costa Brava day tour with boat trip from Barcelona — what Catalans call an excursió d'un dia a la Costa Brava — lies in compression: the Vila Vella seen from the sea, a Mediterranean cove entered at eye level, and a coast that levies no charge at its edge, being public land at Costa Brava, Girona, Catalonia, Spain.