Sant Pere de Galligants and the Arab baths

North of the cathedral, past the Sant Domènec steps, the old town empties out into a quieter quarter along the Galligants stream. Two buildings sit almost side by side: Sant Pere de Galligants, a 12th-century Benedictine monastery with a squat octagonal bell tower and a cloister of carved capitals, and the Banys Àrabs, a Romanesque bathhouse built in the Moorish manner, where a ring of slim columns holds a stone lantern over the cold pool.

The baths are the picture. Light drops through the lantern in a single shaft onto the water, the columns throw it around the walls, and the whole room reads as one clean geometric frame — nothing else in Girona looks like it. The monastery next door adds Romanesque arcades and a cloister of soft, even light.

Middle of the day is when the shaft through the lantern is strongest and most vertical; earlier and later the room is dimmer and flatter, though the cloister works at any hour. Both are small spaces shared with visitors, so a session here is a matter of a few careful frames rather than an hour of setup.

Each has its own ticket and its own hours, and both close on some days of the week — check before you build a plan, and check what a paid session requires inside. The rooftop terrace of the baths gives an unexpected view over the tiled roofs to the cathedral, and the stepped lane outside is a good frame in its own right.