Depends what you’re after..  I was up in the Catalonian Pyrenees a year ago, and loved it..   We were in a town called ………  hmmmm……..   have to wait til I get home to look up the name..  Anyway, beautiful small stone town – great setting, great for walking, etc..  Prob need a car to get there.. Not much to do besides hike, and not many people, but yeah, I suppose that’s part of why I liked it so much..

If that sounds too low-key for you, Girona is a nice, chic town, with which you could combine a nice day trip out to Cadaques and that eastern-most tip of the Spanish mainland, the name of which is also eluding me at the mome…

Another fantastic idea – if you’re half the Spanish wine fanatic I am….  – is go down to Falset, SW of Taragona, and visit the Priorat and Montsant wine regions..  You can visit a lot of wineries, drink wine(duh..), and the landscape is fantastic..  There’s a small town on top of a mountain called Siurana(sp?) that was unforgettable..(see – I remember the name..)

Yet another site worth going to – and sorry, the name isn’t there – was this ski area up in the mountains..  You can go up there though with a train and hike back down – 3-4 hours, great landscape..  Val de something..

One suggestion – a good one in my experience – is to just go to a local tourist office, and just tell them what you want to do and ask for recommendations..  Several of the great places we ended up going to we found this way.. (Morella is a good example..)

All in all, on that trip we never got to Barcelona cuz there was so much other great stuff to do in Catalonia….

Have you been to Valencia? its very quaint []
 
the beach is fabulous and there is a nice market there!

No offense to Valencia fans, but it wasn’t my cup of tea..

Getting out of Valencia, heading two hours north up the coast(overdeveloped, overtouristed..), and then one hour inland to Marella, was the highlight of my Valencia trip…

Valencia is too modern, and surrounded by overdevelopment for my taste…

Plus, unlike other places in Spain I’ve been, I just didn’t find the central outdoor cafes for relaxed book/paper-reading, coffee-drinking, and people-watching… Was all a big congested traffic-jam..