In September 1229, a fleet under Jaume I of Aragon weighed anchor off Salou and sailed for Mallorca. There was no harbour then — only an open roadstead, a shelving beach, and a headland to shelter behind. Eight centuries later, the same seven kilometres of water between that beach and the fishing port of Cambrils carries passengers instead of soldiers, and the modern boat trip to Cambrils from Salou follows almost exactly the line those galleys took around Cap Salou. Cambrils grew from the sea rather than beside it. Its old quarter, Cambrils Vila, sits roughly a kilometre inland, built at a defensive remove from the corsairs who worked this coast into the eighteenth century. The port below it was the exposed half, guarded by the Torre del Port, a squat seventeenth-century watchtower that now holds a small municipal museum. The fishing fleet that sheltered beneath it never left. Trawlers still unload each afternoon at the llotja, the auction hall where the day's catch is sold by descending price, and the quay keeps the working geometry of nets, ice and diesel. Between the two towns lies Cap Salou, a wooded limestone headland that divides the Costa Daurada into two distinct moods. North of it, the long shallow sandbars that gave the coast its name — daurada, golden — run flat towards Tarragona. South of it, the shoreline breaks into coves: Cala Llenguadets, Cala Font, Platja dels Capellans. The Salou lighthouse, in service since 1858 on the Punta del Cavall, still marks the turn. This is the stretch that Salou–Cambrils catamaran crossings trace, and the reason boat trip to Cambrils from Salou tours read as a coastal survey rather than a transfer: the cliffs, umbrella pines and calas are invisible from the coastal road. The two municipalities were separate long before they were resorts; Salou itself only split from Vila-seca in 1989. Their maritime link is older than either boundary. Known locally as the trajecte en barca, the route is now sailed by catamarans and speedboats rather than lateen-rigged fishing craft, and boat trip to Cambrils from Salou tickets are issued from Passeig de Miramar, a short walk from the sand Jaume I's men crossed. The crossing remains what it has always been — the shortest honest distance between two harbours.