Some locations end up on every Catalan landscape and night photographer’s list, and Santa Perpètua de Gaià is one of the most beautiful and best known. This last long weekend I took a group of seven people from Photo Tour Barcelona to get a feel for this tiny hamlet in Pontils, in the Conca de Barberà, where the ruined church of Santa Maria and the fortified castle tower stand side by side on the edge of a cliff above the river Gaià.
We started with the sunset light at the church, moved on to the tower and stayed well into the night in search of the Milky Way. Here’s what we photographed, the technique behind every image, and why one of them means a great deal to me.
The church of Santa Maria at sunset
The church of Santa Maria replaced a Romanesque chapel documented in 1172, of which only the old doorway remains. The current building dates from the early 19th century, stopped holding services in the 1930s and is now in ruins. Its façade, with the curved gable, the oculus and the bell tower, is one of the most recognisable silhouettes of the Gaià valley.
We arrived early enough to explore it in daylight. The sky gave us a blanket of small, orderly clouds, the kind that add texture to the whole frame, and the low sun kept lighting up the stone. The path to the door works as a natural leading line to the façade, so we tried frontal, side and backlit compositions, with the sun peeking through the clouds and autumn shrubs in the foreground.
Technique: for landscape shots I use HDR: three exposures 2 stops apart, at f/5.6–f/11, merged in Photoshop with Nik Collection and finished in Lightroom. That way I keep detail in both the sky and the shaded stone.
Inside the church: a nave open to the sky
For me, the interior is the most surprising part of the visit. Over time the vaults have deteriorated until they collapsed, leaving the nave open to the sky; the dome over the crossing has fallen in too, yet you can still make out the cornices, the capitals and traces of paint on the walls. Shooting upwards from the floor, the bell tower appears framed by the gap the fallen vault has left behind. A wide-angle lens is essential here to take in the whole nave.
The castle tower, a 10th-century lookout
Behind the church rises the tower of the castle of Santa Perpètua. The whole site occupies a narrow, elongated platform crowning a cliff some 55 metres above the river Gaià. The castle is documented from the year 976 and was part of the frontier line of the County of Barcelona; it was destroyed during Almanzor’s campaigns and rebuilt in 1012.
The tower is a truly unusual piece: inside it has a triangular plan with rounded corners, and it is considered one of the most peculiar examples of pre-Romanesque military architecture in Catalonia.
A wooden walkway leads up to the tower. From below and with the wide-angle lens, it looks even taller: the railings and floorboards create vanishing lines that rise towards the battlements. In one shot the sun was setting right at the end of the walkway; in the other you can clearly see the tower’s two volumes, one in dressed stone and one in rubble masonry.
Before the light went, one last composition: a stone arch framing the rock walls and forest of the valley. It’s a simple device, a frame within the frame, but it works beautifully here because the foreground rock catches the warm sunset light while the background stays green and blue.
The night: Milky Way and vortex
The main reason for the trip was the Milky Way. For more detail on these techniques and other locations where I use them, see my article on night photography in Catalonia: Milky Way, vortex and light painting.
The Milky Way beside the bell tower
In portrait format, the galactic arch rises on the left of the frame alongside the bell tower, while the façade, the oculus and the doorway glow in warm tones. The same path we used at sunset becomes the leading line again, now in half-darkness.
Technique: between 21 and 31 frames per scene, ISO 1600–3200, f/2.8 and around 15 seconds’ exposure, with the 14-24 mm set at 18 mm. I edit the frames in Lightroom, export them as TIFF and stack them in Sequator; then I run the result through the David Boixo Photography plugin in Photoshop and give it a final colour and light adjustment in Lightroom.
A vortex snatched from a cloudy night
This is the photo from the trip I value most, and not just for the result. All night long we had clouds, and clouds, and more clouds. At times it looked as if we’d come away with nothing, but we kept shooting and made the most of every clear spell. In the end the stars traced their vortex around the Pole Star, right above the bell tower, lit here in red.
Technique: around 31 frames, ISO 3200, f/2.8 and a minimum of 15 seconds’ exposure, with the 14-24 mm at 18 mm. I edit them lightly in Lightroom, export them as TIFF (Adobe 1998, 16-bit) and stack them in Sequator into a single final frame.
Join one of my photography day trips and learn to shoot this location the way you see it in this article — sunset HDR, the Milky Way and star vortices included — with a local photographer who knows every corner of Catalonia.
Santa Perpètua de Gaià at a glance
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