Prats, the hamlet on the pilgrims' way to Meritxell

Prats is best understood on foot rather than from a car. It sits on the hillside above Canillo, right on the old royal road that brought pilgrims to Meritxell. To my mind it’s the best starting point for the sanctuary, because you arrive the way people always used to. If you’re staying in Canillo, the path up starts behind the tourist office, by the riverside chapel of Santa Creu, so you don’t even need the car.

Sant Miquel de Prats, Romanesque without the make-up

The village church is Sant Miquel de Prats, which Andorra Turisme holds up as a textbook case of rural Andorran Romanesque. It was built roughly, with humble materials, as a rectangular nave with walls a metre thick and a semicircular apse facing east. Two details are worth a proper look, the pointed pumice-stone arch over the door and the double bell gable with round arches. It was restored in the early 1980s.

Its recent story is more interesting than the exterior suggests. The Comú explains that it’s a listed heritage site and that its sixteenth-century altarpiece, attributed to the painter Miquel Ramells and the gilder Guiu Borgonyó, known together as the Master of Canillo, was broken up in the twentieth century. Only the statue of St Michael survives. On 16 June 2026 the Comú and the Andorran government signed an agreement to make a reproduction and install it in its original place, and the ministry was due to put the church’s structural repairs out to tender that year. The same artists signed the altarpiece still in place at Sant Joan de Caselles.

How do you walk from Prats to Meritxell?

Along the royal road, waymarked from the church. The Comú’s guide describes the whole route starting at Santa Creu chapel in Canillo, about 4 km and 40 minutes with barely 50 m of climbing, and says you can start directly in Prats. Andorra Turisme gives it as 3.79 km and just over 40 minutes, with water points and places to rest.

Leaving Prats past the church, the path forks. Left takes you to the Roc de les Bruixes, a group of Bronze Age and medieval carvings found in 1962. Right is the royal road, and as you descend you see the sanctuary and Meritxell’s sixteenth-century boundary cross, also known as Charlemagne’s Cross. Two little oratories tell you you’ve reached Meritxell Sanctuary.

The cross with seven arms

Between Canillo and Prats, on a bank beside the old path, stands the Creu dels Set Braços. Andorra Turisme tells its legend. Seven lads from Prats sent a timid friend to Canillo for wine, handing him a shotgun to calm his nerves, and waited for him on the way back with a surprise, a white figure waving in the middle of the path. He fired, and the devil took him away as punishment for the pranksters. That’s why the cross had seven arms, and why, the story goes, it lost one. The original stands outside the Comú de Canillo and there’s a copy near Prats.

Easy walks from the village

Prats is also the start of the inter-parish path to Sant Miquel d’Engolasters, through Canillo, Encamp and Escaldes-Engordany. The Comú’s guide gives 11.6 km, four hours and only 185 m of ascent, marked with yellow dots and the letters CI. You can do it all or in sections, and I like the idea of walking between two churches named after the same saint. The far end is covered in Sant Miquel d’Engolasters.

In August 2026 the Comú also installed a nature trail at Prats on the circular Llebre path, with panels explaining to children and adults how nature inspires engineering. And Andorra Turisme’s cycling route 01 climbs from Canillo to the El Forn area past Sant Miquel, 5.2 km at an average gradient of 7.5%.

The May fiesta

Prats holds its village fiesta in spring. In 2026 it fell on a Saturday in May, with the village car park turned into a square, a flea market, Mass at Sant Miquel, a classical guitar concert and a communal sausage lunch. The Comú presents it as a young fiesta that’s finding its feet, and I’d only add that it’s a good excuse to come up.