Prades owes its fame to an exile: that of cellist Pablo Casals, who founded a now world-renowned classical music festival here in 1950, staged in the cloister of a thousand-year-old abbey. Curated from the Loca database, no paid placement.
The Cuxa abbey, a few kilometres south, and Prades' historic centre.
A Benedictine abbey founded in the 9th century, one of Catalonia's most important pre-Romanesque and Romanesque complexes. Half its cloister, sold off in the early 20th century, now furnishes the Met's Cloisters museum in New York; the other half was restored on site.
A monumental Baroque altarpiece carved by Josep Sunyer between 1699 and 1707, one of the masterpieces of Catalan Baroque, beneath a 12th-century Lombard bell tower.
Founded in 1950 by Catalan cellist Pablo Casals, who took refuge in Prades after the Spanish Civil War, the classical music festival is held every summer in the Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa cloister.
Casals lived in exile in Prades from 1939 to 1950, refusing to perform publicly for as long as Franco's dictatorship endured in Spain, a political stand that shaped the town's identity.
Prades opens onto the trail network of the Canigou massif (2,784 m), the sacred mountain of the Catalans, site of a traditional torchlight gathering every summer solstice.
A stop on the Train Jaune, a heritage narrow-gauge line that has crossed the Conflent and Cerdagne since 1910, linking Villefranche-de-Conflent to the Spanish border while clinging to the valley sides.
About twenty kilometres west, this Conflent gorge is crossed on footbridges suspended above the torrent, one of the most spectacular hikes in the Pyrénées-Orientales.
A weekly Tuesday-morning market on Place de la République, Conflent produce.
Restaurants and cafés cluster around Place de la République and the Saint-Pierre church, in central Prades.
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