Isidro Jabato, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
4 places
Two Sitges, Four Hundred Metres Apart
The genre-film festival and the gay strip are the same town, built by the same 19th-century habit of forming societies.
Why you should go
- The 59th Sitges Film Festival runs 8–18 October 2026, with a fiftieth-anniversary tribute to De Palma's Carrie
- Bears Week runs 4–13 September 2026; Carnival is currently placed at 20 February–2 March 2027, council-confirmed each autumn
- Everything here is inside a fifteen-minute walk — the festival's birthplace hall, the bar strip, and the seafront monument
- One venue to check before you plan around it: El Retiro's hall has been shut for renovation since May 2024
Sitges is famous for two things that sound unrelated. One is the fantastic film festival that Wikipedia's editors rank with Fantasia and Fantastic Fest. The other is one of the densest concentrations of gay bars in Europe. They occupy the same few streets, and the distance between the hall the festival started in and the corner the bar strip starts at is about four hundred metres.
The connective tissue is duller and more interesting than a coincidence: nineteenth-century Sitges got rich on money coming back from Cuba and the Americas, and rich provincial towns in Catalonia spent that money forming societies. Buildings with stages in them. Members who programme things.
The room the festival came out of
Casino Prado Suburense is one of those societies — 1877, a hall from 1870, films since 1907. In 1968 its members put on a week of fantastic cinema in their own theatre, and that week is the direct ancestor of the 59th edition running 8 to 18 October 2026, which this year builds a programme around the fiftieth anniversary of Brian De Palma's Carrie plus Spanish and Asian genre strands.
The festival long ago outgrew the room. Its main screen is now the 1,380-seat Auditori in a hotel out at Aiguadolç. But the Prado still screens, still runs a cineclub, and still has a garden it puts films in.
One caution before anyone builds an October itinerary: El Retiro, the town's other historic society and a festival venue for decades, has had its hall closed for renovation since May 2024 with no reopening date published. Check it, don't assume it.
The other four hundred metres
Downhill from the Prado, Parrots has held the corner of Plaça de la Indústria for over thirty years, at the head of the Joan Tarrida strip. It is the assembly point rather than the most interesting room on it, which is a useful thing to know before you spend a whole evening there.
Keep walking to the seafront and you reach the part that guidebooks skip. The pink triangle on the Passeig Marítim went up in 2006 to mark ten years since 5 October 1996, and the town catalogued it in its own municipal sculpture park rather than leaving it as somebody else's plaque. A resort that does that is making a different claim about itself than a resort with a rainbow flag over a bar door.
Don't miss doing the walk in one go, in that order — Prado, strip, monument, sea — in the hour before sunset. It takes about twenty minutes and it is the only way the two Sitges read as one place rather than two listings.
