Montblanc is a medieval town that still looks the part. Its defining feature is its ring of stone, a walled enclosure begun in 1366 under King Peter the Ceremonious, running some 1,500 meters around the old town and once studded with 28 towers and a series of fortified gates named for saints: Sant Jordi, Sant Antoni, and the rest. Founded in the 12th century, Montblanc grew important enough to be named a Ducal Town in 1387, and the kings of the Crown of Aragon kept an occasional residence here in the Palau Reial. Inside the walls, the medieval street plan survives largely intact, threaded with the stately homes of families whose names, Josa and Castellvi and Desclergue, still hang above the doorways. To walk in through one of the old portals is to step back several centuries at once.

The grandest building in Montblanc was never finished. The church of Santa Maria la Major, which locals call the Cathedral of the Mountain, was rising in soaring Gothic when the Black Death swept through in the 14th century and drained the town of the hands and money to complete it. What stands is still magnificent: a single vast nave lined with side chapels beneath a ribbed vault, fronted by a later doorway of Renaissance proportion and Baroque flourish that replaced a Gothic original destroyed in 1651. It is not the only church worth the walk. At the convent of Sant Francesc, once among the oldest in Catalonia and said to have sheltered Saint Francis of Assisi himself for a single night, the Catalan Courts convened in 1414, one of several occasions on which this small town played host to the parliament of a kingdom.

Montblanc's story is not all kings and cathedrals; much of it is written in the plain machinery of daily life. In the main square stands the Font Major, a monumental fountain built in 1804, and beneath the arcaded Porxos de cal Malet sit the old stone measures once used to portion out grain, the town's medieval unit of trade cut straight into rock. A covered stream, the Torrent del Riuot, still runs unseen beneath the square. Down at the river, a Romanesque bridge from the 12th century keeps its original structure of pillar-buttresses and arches. There was a Jewish quarter here too, with its own synagogue and cemetery; today only the shape of its streets survives, the quiet outline of a community long gone. At the edge of town, a pair of medieval flour mills now forms a regional museum, where the grinding wheels can still be set turning.

For all its antiquity, Montblanc never stopped building. On the edge of the old town rises the Celler Cooperatiu, a wine cooperative designed in the early 20th century by the modernist architect Cesar Martinell, one of the great brick-and-tile 'cathedrals of wine' that lent Catalan farming the dignity of soaring vaulted ceilings. The town remains a working gateway to its region: a stage on the Catalan Way of St. James, a doorstep to the Cistercian Route and the rugged Prades Mountains, whose prehistoric rock art earned UNESCO recognition in 1998. Come in April and the streets fill for Medieval Week, when residents in period dress reenact the town's past, dragon and all. Come in winter and the tables fill instead with calcots, the sweet young onions charred over open flame and eaten by hand with a smoky sauce, the messiest and most beloved of Catalan feasts.