Sant Agustí de Lluçanès

The municipality, located in the northern sector of the Lluçanès sub-region, is made up of two small centers of concentrated population, Alou -urban nucleus-, and Sant Agustí de Lluçanès, together with a dispersed neighborhood of farmers, and has a extension of 13.38 km2. The characteristic landscape of this plateau combines pastures with extensive forests of Scots pine and oak woods and extreme use in the cultivation of ironworks and cereals.

The persistence in the farming and livestock activity of the majority of its inhabitants creates a panorama that is difficult to repeat and offers the visitor a favorable setting for excursions, going looking for mushrooms and enjoying a good meal in one of its restaurants, as well as its offer. in rural accommodation.

Under the Serrat de Ginestes and very close to the Collet de Sant Agustí, you can discover, at the point of the same road towards Alpens, the small neighborhood of Sant Agustí that gives its name to the municipality. Four houses located near the old and ennobled manor of Grao nestle the small parish church of Sant Agustí, a very old building that we find already documented in the year 905 when it was a suffragan parish of Lluçà. Despite the multiple modifications carried out over the centuries, the building still preserves some Romanesque elements, especially the interior. A large belfry gives the church a particularly unique personality.

The main street of the urban area, called Alou, basically arose during the 17th century due to the passage through this place of transhumant herds that stopped, it still preserves the typical rural architecture of the Baroque period. On the same street, there is the town hall building and, not far away, above the same street, the church of Sant Genís del Pi, which before the year 938 belonged to the Ripoll monastery and its term formed an autonomous jurisdiction as an independent allode of the domain of the castle of Daucastella de Sora. Today the church of Sant Genís is suffragan of that of Sant Agustí.

From the top of the Els Munts mountain range (1059 m), the highest point in the municipality, you can see an extraordinary panoramic view: to the west, the Lluçanès plateau, to the east, the Torelló valley; at midday, the Montseny and the entire pre-coastal formation, and in the Tramuntana, the nearby and majestic Pyrenees and the emblematic Pedraforca massif.

The Santuario dels Munts, which existed in the year 1170, presides over the entire region and has been the center of an important Marian and popular tradition for centuries. In the current church, built at the end of the 17th century as a culmination of the importance that the place took on, an image of Saint Mary is venerated, a Romanesque work from the 13th century that was restored in 1929.