"L'estudiant de la Garrotxa" by Josep Berga i Boix is a novel written in the late 19th century. Set between Girona and the stark valleys and cliffs of La Garrotxa, it follows a poor seminarian who discovers a talent for decorative painting, rises to local renown, and is pulled between priesthood, art, and his growing love for Margarida, the rector’s niece. The story blends lively portraits of student poverty and small-town life with an intimate emotional conflict over vocation and desire. The opening of the work presents a first-person narrator among a band of penniless seminarians in Girona, hustling for food and lodging while he earns coins modeling pessebre figures and learning gilding. His craft brings him to paint chapels, first in Girona and then in a Garrotxa village, where the kindly rector Mossèn Anton hosts him and his niece Margarida quietly captivates him. As they decorate the church together, shared glances, garden walks, and whispered exchanges turn affection into a consuming inward struggle that clashes with his supposed calling. The narrator’s fame grows, yet seeing older masterful canvases humbles him and pushes him to study drawing seriously. Sent to an isolated hermitage, he endures comic overfeeding at a farmer’s house, returns by pretext to the rectory, and faces village gossip and the suspicious eye of the fiery vicar Mossèn Just. Forced back to Girona, he parts from Margarida in a painful dawn farewell, throws himself into drawing and small commissions, and then a chance encounter with the vicar shakes his resolve to return—leaving the early narrative poised at a tense crossroads.