What an eventful autumn odyssey I have been enjoying, split between my two favourite European countries, France and Spain. I've made some delightful discoveries that I'm really keen to pass on.

We were touring in the 'armpit' area of the Mediterranean where Catalan is spoken on both sides of the border. On the map, it's where the Spanish Costa Brava meets the Languedoc region of SW France - in short, between Barcelona and Béziers.

What a mix of weather! We even encountered that full-scale hurricane which hit the Costa Brava ('wild coast' indeed!) which you probably saw on TV here. The floods eased soon, followed by day-upon-day of perfect motoring and canal-cruising conditions - sunny, warm and wind-free.

The two days of Spanish 'tormentas' affected only one aspect of my trip - the water in the coves of the Costa Brava was too murky for snorkelling, which regular readers know is my new holiday hobby. Indeed, I saw some suspicious-looking flotsam from the local storm drains which indicated that I would not have to swim, but just go through the motions! ( You've used that joke twice before - Editor).

Here are my Latest Insider Tips for making the most of Barcelona, the Costa Brava, Girona, and tiny Port Lligat (what a discovery!), plus the wonderful wine-growing - and rugby-playing - region of Languedoc Rousillion, particularly around one shortish stretch of the Canal du Midi between Narbonne and Béziers.

EUROPE'S EDGIEST BUT MOST EXHAUSTING CITYBREAK

BARCELONA is everyone's favourite top citybreak destination for a good reason - it's an exciting, exhausting and edgy place provided that you bring plenty of money (and hide it - this is the Pickpocket Capital of Europe,too.)

Elsewhere in this issue of Travel News there's a comprehensive fact-file on the most popular city attractions, so I'll just make a few personal recommendations

l STAY at the Hotel Jazz for its stylish, comfortable rooms and pretty good location within a five minute walk of the Plaça d' Espanya where tourists congregate in millions. The Universitat Metro line runs right underneath the hotel, so you can hear the odd rumble but the area is surprisingly quiet at night.

I loved the superb little rooftop pool with a sun terrace offering a glorious 360 degree panorama of the city's university area and beyond. Have a sundowner drink

up there before hitting Barcelona's amazing variety of affordable bars and restaurants (always take a taxi). The hotel's own Jazz Bar didn't offer much in the way of jazz, but was popular with the raunchy 40th Birthday Hen Party from Huddersfield who were so desperate for male company that they propositioned ME in the lift! I haven't been so flattered in years.

You can get good off-season and weekend discounts on this place and its sister, Hotel 1889, through www.tripadvisor.com where they are both rated in the Top Five of Barcelona's 420 places to stay. That's why I chose the Jazz in the first place - plus the fact that we needed to have a hotel with its own car parking. Barcelona is a nightmare for traffic and parking.Check out jazz@nnhotels.es

l Take a tour on the Bus Turistic, which stops outside the Hotel Jazz. It offers three different routes - which would take a whole day - for around eight quid. The guide wouldn't give me the Student Discount even though I proved I was a student of Spanish by conducting my futile negotiation in a learner's version of her language. She turned out to be not very good at English herself, but an excellent little guide book and discount coupons is included.

l Go to the Museu Picasso for a really satisfying exhibition of The Greatest Modern Artist's early works - including some very explicit brothel drawings (was this his famous 'Blue' Period?) which are far too rude to be offered among the hundreds of Picasso postcards and posters in the excellent museum shop. A great restaurant and courtyard café, too.

l Don't miss the imposing Museu National d'Art de Catalunya which houses vast collections covering a millennium of Catalan Art, from mock-ups of ancient church interiors to the cutting edge contemporary art still being created in this inspiring region. The vista from the top of the steps, down through a Stormont-like avenue bordered by the 1929 International Exhibition buildings, is literally breathtaking.

l Take your pick of restaurants - we ate well for £15 a head at Celler de Tapas near the Hotel Jazz and at Posit, a harbourside seafood restaurant that was too pricey to recommend - so I won't.

FIVE-STAR LUXURY - UNSPOILT SETTING

DRIVING from Barcelona northwards up the Costa Brava, we hit some of the resorts where mass tourism began in the 1950s.

Our only stopover was at Blanes, to visit the delightful Marimurta Botanical Gardens featuring diverse collections of exotic plants from all over the planet, thriving upon a blessed sunny Mediterranean hillside. Recommended.

Tossa de Mar and Lloret de Mar were not looking their best off-season, even in the autumn sunshine. Without crowds of bronzed sun-bathers on their vast golden beaches, and with mountains of plastic chairs stacked outside empty restaurants, there's a sadness that encouraged us to make haste to our destination up the coast.

S'Agaro, between better-known San Feliu and Platja d'Aro, is a little gem with everything a seaside resort needs - a sunny, surf-washed beach and rocky coves sheltered by headlands, a range of good family restaurants, hotels and interesting shops - including a super deli hung with scores of my favourite Iberico smoked hams.

Soaring above the sands is the Hostal de la Gavina with its huge stylish seagull logo and its five stars proudly proclaiming that this is THE place to stay hereabouts.

In fact, La Gavina is the only establishment in the whole region to be granted the Five-Star Grand Luxe accolade. Anybody who thinks that 'Hostal' means a 'hostel' will be either delighted by the super deluxe facilities for a hostel, or knocked flat by hostel rates which start at £120 per standard room, up to £550 a day for the opulent Royal Suite.

La Gavina did, indeed, start in 1932 as a small inn on a beautiful headland. The Gironan owner bought all the surrounding land to ensure that the private villas to be built on this unspoiled promontory would be in harmony with nature and conform to Catalan architectural principles.

We spent a morning strolling along the spectacular new Coastal Walk which is now accessible to the general public, and were intrigued by glimpses of hidden mansions. Better still were sightings of lizards and squirrels in the pine trees hanging over secret coves and rugged inlets. What a setting for a swanky hotel. I loved it.

La Gavina has everything a Leading Hotel of the World member should offer: superb rooms with ocean-view terraces, majestic public rooms, a new spa and a saltwater pool complete with private cabanas - a popular photo-shoot location for magazines like ¡Hola! Best of all for me was the quality of the food in the restaurants. We had a memorable dress-up dinner featuring six exquisite courses of highly creative cuisine in the opulent atmosphere of the Candlelight Restaurant. Heavenly.

I cannot begin to catalogue all the hotel's sports and leisure activities offered in its April-October season, from paddle tennis to water-skiing. I was quite content in the three blissful days we spent there to swim and wander around the colourful gardens dripping wih scented oleander shrubs - the authentic, unmistakable fragrance of the Med.

The helpfulness of the staff and the superlative standards of maintenance are a credit to Ana Requena, the charming Director General.

Check outwww.lagavina.com for details of the 2007 rates and deals.

TIP OF THE YEAR FOR A GREAT HOTEL

EN ROUTE from S'Agaro to our next port of call, little Port Lligat next to Cadaqués on the French border, we opted for the scenic coastal route. A mistake.

'Scenic' should be spelt S-C-A-R-Y because this tortuous road winds through blind S-bends on a corniche that has been blasted out of cliffs, with dizzy drops onto jagged rocks on the driver's side.

The coastal scenery may have been awesome, but when your eyes are glued to the upcoming corner in expectation of a German tour bus swinging round to side-swipe us into perdition, there's no time to watch the dolphins a thousand feet below. Once, I thought I had peed myself with fright but was 'relieved' to discover it was only tepid coke leaking into my lap!

We had a very happy landing into the splendid Hotel Port Lligat, a superb family-run hotel located next door to the main reason for our visit to such an out of the way place - the astonishing House of Salvador Dali, one of the greatest artists, conmen and characters of all time.

As a long-time fan of modern art, I just had to make a pilgrimage to the remote fishing villiage where he set up home with his wife Gala. Thousands of painters, art students and curious (in both senses) tourists like me, queue to take the half-hour tour of what must be the most eccentri , utterly fascinating and beautifully located private home on the planet.

As the most famous surrealist painter in art history (he died in 1989), Dali has become a one-man tourist industry with three Museums/Galleries in The Dali Triangle of his Catalonia homeland - Figueres, where he was born, Cadaqués where he worked and here in Port Lligat where he spent six months of every year.

The tiny fisherman's cabin he acquired right on the beach was expanded year by year as he became wealthy, by purchasing adjacent properties. It is now a warren of whitewashed rooms, corridors and courtyards filled to overflowing with every kind of eccentric artefact - from a giant bear and three pet swans he had stuffed, to plastic toys and phones in the shape of lobsters as well as rude statues and odd furniture, drapes and screens.

Casa Dali's most famous feature - and the one which most impressed our grandson Simon who visited last year with our artistic daughter - is the swimming pool shaped like a big 25ft willy where Gala would swim naked (presumably doing the breaststroke, nudge,nudge,wink,wink!).

It was a delight, after jostling with the cosmopolitan crowds in such an mind-blowing museum, to dander uphill to the simple cool-blue decor of our wonderful room ( just 50 quid a day!) in the Hotel Port Lligat, to sit on our terrace overlooking the perfect crescent of a bay before having a swim in the hotel pool.

The hotel owner Ubald Pell, a personable young Catalan who is also the chef, serves up great-value £16 meals prepared with flair using local produce and the freshest fish caught by the boats on the quay below.

Go to www.port-lligat.net/hotel, a webpage which does not do justice to this excellent hotel which I am nominating as my Discovery of the Year.!

GIRONA - ANCIENT HEART OF COSTA BRAVA

IN MY 29 VISITS to Spain and her offshore islands, I thought I had 'done' just about everywhere worthwhile - until I set foot in Girona, compact capital of the region stretching from the Costa Brava to the Pyrenees.

¡Estupendo! (as we say in my Spanish GCSE night class where my accent, like the verb tense , is imperfect...).

What a find! We booked the Hotel Ciutat de Girona at the last minute from a phonebox on the Autopiste 7 Service Area 20 kms away from the city and just followed the exemplary road signage to the front door.

The hotel is No1 in the TripAdvisor regional rankings and it turned out to be an immaculate, friendly, brilliantly-run haven in the very centre of this compact old city which combines mediaeval charm with youthful vibrancy stemming from its big undergraduate population.

Girona is probably best known here for having given its name to the Spanish Armada vessel, the galleass Girona (whose treasures were on display in Belfast's only real world-class visitor attraction, the Ulster Museum, until some misguided bureaucrats decided to close the place down COMPLETELY for a makeover. Idiotic.)

The hotel receptionist Joan (that's a man's name in Catalonia) gave us the most spacious room available after I greeted him in the Catalan version of "How's about ye, oul haun."

Parched, and having forgotten to bring up a bottle of water, we were chuffed to find a mini-bar stocked with ice-cold mineral waters, cokes, juices and beers - for FREE. my favourite price.

We had a great Mediterranean dinner in the ultra-cool restaurant, whose decor comprised floor-to-ceiling boxes of back-lit wine bottles filled with coloured oils and vinegars. V.Effective.

After a quiet, tranquil night's sleep (the hotel is in a traffic-free zone) we had a truly five-star breakfast comprising a score of Spanish specialities that was far superior to anything I have ever enjoyed at a B&B rate of £30 a head anywhere, never mind a city centre! I sought out the hands-on General Manager, a gorgeous young woman who was pleased that we made a point of thanking her for such an enjoyable experience.

Biggest Girona attraction is the Cathedral, but frankly cathedrals are almost as common as Irish Pubs in Spain so we went for a totally different spiritual experience - a tour of the ancient Jewish Quarter. Rarely have I been so impressed by any comparable experience. The Museum at its core relates the story of the Sephardic Jews who were eventually driven out and many arrived in Britain to enrich our lives,like Prime Minister Disraeli.

Also, since clothes shopping abroad is not so interesting now that the fashion rails are so often groaning with the same multinational euroclobber we get at home, it was refreshing to see how many of Girona's shops feature out of the ordinary styles designed and made locally. My wife Karen was thrilled to choose key elements of her winter wardrobe from a designer boutique next to the hotel. Its name eludes me now, but no doubt it will figure large on our next credit card statement!

Find out about Girona (or Gerona as some airline websites such as Ryanair,MyTravel and Air Scotland spell it) at www.visitgirona.com. Book the hotel through www.hotel-ciutatdegirona.com. You will thank me, I promise!

BY award winning travel journalist John Trew