On Avinguda Caritat Serinyana, the street everyone comes into the village by, there's a bakery that's been open since 1879. That's not a figure of speech: Pastisseria Quer was founded by Xico Quer 147 years ago, and today it's run by the fifth generation of the same family. Five generations cover a lot of ground — a Civil War, the arrival of tourism, fashions and their opposites — and the shop is still standing, with a Quer behind the counter. In a village where so many businesses open in June and vanish by September, that continuity is almost a monument, except you eat it for breakfast instead of visiting it.
1879: Xico Quer opens the bakery
The story starts with Xico Quer, who founded the bakery in 1879, when Cadaqués lived off the sea and the vineyard and tourism wasn't even imaginable. Think about what this village was back then: cut off behind the Pení mountains, with a road that would take decades to deserve the name, and still with enough of a clientele to keep a bakery running. It was born for the village, not the visitor, and that's a difference you can still feel when you walk in.
The business hasn't left the family since. Each generation picked it up from the one before and added something to it, which is the quiet way real businesses grow old without becoming outdated.
Anton and the war: keeping the oven lit
The hardest chapter fell to Anton Quer, who kept the business going through the Civil War. You don't need to imagine the details to understand what that meant: rationed flour, sugar turned into a luxury, a border village emptying out, and a family deciding every morning that the bakery would open anyway. Many businesses in the area didn't survive those years; this one did.
That the shop selling you breakfast today went through all that and kept going is part of what you're buying when you walk in. It's not written on any sign, but it's there in the simple fact that the door opens.
Joaquim's brioche and Antoni's France
Each generation left its mark on the display case. Joaquim Quer introduced the brioche, that enriched dough which today feels like it's always been there, but was once a novelty someone had to dare bake in a fishing village. Later, Antoni Quer went off to train in France and came back with French techniques and with chocolate, widening the house's range.
It's a nice pattern: the business wasn't preserved by freezing it in place, but by going out to learn and bringing what was learned back to the same address. Tradition, here, isn't repetition; it's accumulation.
Today: the fifth generation serves you in person
The current baker, fifth generation, serves customers in the shop himself. What was normal in 1900 is a rarity in 2026: the person ringing up your croissant carries the founder's surname and a century and a half of family craft. No franchise, no chain, no central bakery forty kilometres away.
You'll find it at Avinguda Caritat Serinyana 13, on the way between the car park and the old town, so there's no need to go out of your way: just don't walk past it. If you want to start the day in Cadaqués with something carrying more history than most of the monuments you're about to photograph, this is the place.
147 years, in perspective
Cadaqués rightly boasts long-lived businesses: El Marítim has faced the beach for 91 years, Es Baluard has been inside the wall for 59, Casa Anita has shared tables for close to 57. Those are extraordinary numbers for any tourist village. And yet Pastisseria Quer beats every one of them by a good half-century: when Pere Figueras opened El Marítim in 1935, the Quers had already been selling sweet bread on the same street for 56 years.
That's why this profile opens our series on the village's shops. Not because a bakery matters more than a restaurant or a gallery, but because no other counter in Cadaqués has watched so much of the village pass in front of it. Five generations aren't improvised, and they're not forgotten either: they're eaten for breakfast, every morning, at number 13 Caritat Serinyana.