Restaurant in Sagàs, Spain
Farm-sourced Catalan cooking, stay the night.
Els Casals ranks #39 in OAD Europe (2025) and operates from an 18th-century farmhouse in the Berguedà hills, where almost all ingredients come from the family farm. At €€€, it sits a full price tier below most of its peer group. Book if you want serious Catalan cooking in a genuinely rural setting; a car from Barcelona is essential.
If you have already eaten at Els Casals once, the question for a return visit is not whether the food has changed — it is whether you have. The kitchen does not chase novelty. Oriol Rovira cooks what the farm produces, and what the farm produces shifts with the season, not with fashion. Second-time visitors often find that the experience reads differently once you understand what you are actually looking at: an 18th-century farmhouse in the Berguedà hills where five brothers run the land and one of them cooks it. The room is quieter on the second visit, in the leading sense. You stop cataloguing the setting and start paying attention to the plate.
For first-timers, the headline credential is this: Els Casals ranked #39 in Opinionated About Dining's Europe list in 2025 (it was #34 in 2024), and carries 76 points in the 2026 La Liste ranking. These are not casual endorsements. OAD's rankings are driven by votes from serious, well-travelled diners, which means Els Casals has earned a peer reputation that reaches well beyond Catalonia. A Google score of 4.7 across 781 reviews adds a broader ground-level signal: the audience here is not only specialists.
The atmosphere at Els Casals is calm and grounded rather than theatrical. There is no buzzy open kitchen, no ambient soundtrack engineered for mood. What you get instead is the sound of an old farmhouse doing what it has always done — receiving people and feeding them. That stillness is not accidental. It is the physical expression of the kitchen's philosophy: ingredients grown, cooked, and served in the same place, with almost no distance between farm and fork.
Oriol Rovira's menu is à la carte and seasonal. The sourcing is close to absolute in its localism: vegetables from the farm's own plots, eggs from the hens, a herd of Duroc pigs reared in semi-liberty, wild mushrooms and truffles from the surrounding area. Game features when the season allows. The Pularda , a slow-grown French-style capon , is the dish most often cited by returning guests as the reason to come back. This is not a restaurant that will surprise you with technique for its own sake. The ambition runs in a different direction: to make the ingredients the argument.
The private dining question at €€€ pricing is direct. The farmhouse setting gives the entire experience a degree of separation from the urban private-dining template. There is no dedicated private room in the conventional hotel-restaurant sense, but the guestrooms change the calculation for groups. Booking the rooms alongside dinner effectively privatises the evening. You are not sharing a historic farmhouse with strangers in the way you share a city restaurant's private annexe. The group arrives, dines, and stays. For a celebratory dinner with four to eight people who want total immersion rather than just a good meal, this is a format that few restaurants at this price tier can match. The closest Catalan comparison for the stay-and-dine format would be a rural hotel with a serious kitchen, but Els Casals is not that , the restaurant is primary and the rooms are an extension of it, not the reverse.
Booking is rated easy by Pearl's standards, which is notable given the OAD ranking. This is partly a function of location: Sagàs is not on the casual tourist circuit, and the farmhouse's capacity is limited. The trade-off is that you have to mean it. Getting here requires a car; it sits roughly 90 minutes from Barcelona, in the pre-Pyrenean hills. Plan the journey before you plan the booking. For the right traveller , someone building a Catalonia trip around serious eating rather than urban convenience , the logistics are part of the point. See our full Sagàs restaurants guide for broader context on the area.
Because booking is relatively accessible compared to the venue's peer group, you do not need to plan months ahead in the way you would for El Celler de Can Roca in Girona or Martin Berasategui in Lasarte-Oria. That said, if you are coordinating a group visit with the guestrooms, give yourself four to six weeks. The farm calendar matters here: autumn brings game and truffles, spring shifts toward vegetables and eggs. Either season makes a strong case, but autumn is when the menu's range is broadest. Summer visits are possible but the à la carte will reflect what the farm is producing in that season, so calibrate expectations accordingly.
Els Casals is located at Els Casals, 08517, Sagàs, in the Berguedà comarca of Catalonia. The price range is €€€, positioning it a full tier below the €€€€ restaurants in Spain's top-table circuit. Guestrooms are available for those who want to stay on-site. A car is essential; public transport to Sagàs is not a realistic option. Booking difficulty is rated easy. Hours are not confirmed in our current data , contact the restaurant directly to verify service times before travelling.
For more on the area, see our Sagàs hotels guide, bars guide, wineries guide, and experiences guide.
Quick reference: €€€ | Sagàs, Catalonia | Easy to book | Car required | Guestrooms available | Seasonal à la carte | OAD Europe #39 (2025)
See the comparison section below.
| Venue | Price | Booking Difficulty | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Els Casals | €€€ | Easy | — |
| Aponiente | €€€€ | Unknown | — |
| Arzak | €€€€ | Unknown | — |
| Azurmendi | €€€€ | Unknown | — |
| Cocina Hermanos Torres | €€€€ | Unknown | — |
| DiverXO | €€€€ | Unknown | — |
What to weigh when choosing between Els Casals and alternatives.
Yes, and more so if the occasion calls for something understated rather than theatrical. The 18th-century farmhouse setting and farm-to-table format from Oriol Rovira's family operation create a sense of place that city restaurants at this price range (€€€) cannot replicate. For a milestone celebration that benefits from calm and substance, it works well. For a big-group, high-energy celebration, somewhere in Barcelona would serve you better.
The venue data does not specify separate lunch and dinner formats, so neither can be called categorically superior. That said, the farmhouse setting and proximity to the surrounding Berguedà countryside make a daytime visit the more logical choice — you arrive in daylight, see where the ingredients come from, and have the option to stay in one of the guestrooms rather than driving back. If you are making the trip from Barcelona, lunch gives you that flexibility.
This is not a restaurant you stumble across — it is in Sagàs, a small municipality in the Berguedà comarca of Catalonia, and requires a deliberate journey. Almost all ingredients come from the family farm on the same property, which shapes the entire menu: à la carte, seasonal, with game and the well-documented Pularda poultry dish as reference points. Ranked #39 in Europe by Opinionated About Dining in 2025, it earns that position through farming rigour rather than technical showmanship. Book a guestroom if you can; the experience makes more sense as an overnight.
There are no directly comparable restaurants in Sagàs itself — the village is too small. The nearest frame of reference is the broader Catalonia fine dining circuit: El Celler de Can Roca in Girona if you want the full modernist set-menu experience, or Les Cols in Olot for another farm-rooted Catalan option at a similar remove from Barcelona. Neither replicates the closed-circle farm philosophy that defines Els Casals.
At €€€, it is priced a tier below Spain's most celebrated tasting-menu restaurants, and the value case is strong for what you receive: a seasonal à la carte built almost entirely from ingredients produced on the same property, in a documented-sustainability operation ranked in La Liste's top restaurants. If you value provenance and place over technical fireworks, it over-delivers at this price point. If you need a city-level buzz to justify the spend, it may feel too quiet.
The venue data does not confirm specific group capacity or private dining arrangements. Given the farmhouse format and the fact that it also operates as a small guesthouse, large groups should check the venue's official channels before assuming availability. For groups of six or more, early coordination is advisable — this is not a venue set up for walk-in parties.
It can work for solo diners, particularly those who combine the meal with an overnight stay in the guestrooms. The à la carte format is more accommodating than a fixed tasting menu for solo visits, as you control pacing and spend. The atmosphere is calm rather than social, which suits a solo trip focused on food and the surrounding landscape rather than a scene.
Location
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