Maybe its importance in Old Europe has declined somewhat since then but Reus still maintains the charm of a historic centre packed with shops where you can buy anything under the sun. Many things have changed since 1304 when King Jaume II authorised the holding of a Monday market, but the tradition is kept up week after week, drawing in both Reus residents and visitors from all the world over.

The city has other merits too, such as its culinary skills and rich architectural legacy, especially the Modernist buildings, fruit of the late-nineteenth-century industrial boom. Reus is Catalunya’s second most important Modernist city; small wonder when we consider that it is in fact the home town of Antoni Gaudí. Curiously enough, however, its Modernist buildings are not in fact the work of the author of the Sagrada Familia but rather a Barcelona man and another eminence of Modernism, Lluís Domènech i Montaner, his disciples Pere Caselles, Joan Rubió and his own son, Pere Domènech i Montaner. Among the most important of these masterpieces of Modernist architecture are the houses Rull, Gasull, Tomás Jordi (1909), Querol, Bartoni, Grau-Pla, Segarra, Tarrats, Punyed, Homdedeu and Quadrada, as well as the building that houses the head office of the Bank of Spain.

The two most famous works are the Casa Navàs (1907) and the Instituto Pere Mata.

Modernism apart, other buildings worth a look are the Teatre Fortuny and the Gran Teatro Bartrina.

The Iglesia Prioral de Sant Pere was built in 1512 over the Romanesque Iglesia de Santa Maria. This priory church, designed by Benet Otger, has a slim Gothic nave with a striking Renaissance portal and a fine rose window. Most of the altarpieces were destroyed during Spain’s Civil War, except for the main altarpiece, whose fabrics and statues were shared out between the Museo Municipal and different parts of the church. Another of this church’s gems is its belfry, also Gothic.

Legend has it that in 1592 the Virgin Mary appeared before a shepherdess and liberated Reus from the plague epidemic that threatened it. On the spot of this apparition, on the outskirts of the town, the Santuario de Misericordia was raised in the seventeenth century.

Other musts are the eighteenth-century Baroque-style Palau de Bofarull, which includes a Neoclassical room with frescos, the Renaissance-style Casa Espuny and the abbey and the Casa Marc, both of the eighteenth century.

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