Cunit is where the Garraf coast stops climbing and settles into long, flat sand. It is the first town of Tarragona province as you come down from Barcelona, sitting just past Cubelles and the mouth of the Foix, with Calafell running on to the south-west. The town is mostly holiday apartments and family streets, quiet in winter and crowded in August, and its great virtue at the end of a ride is a broad beach with a promenade where you can park, peel off the jacket and watch the sea go pewter in the evening.
The reason people end a day here is usually what came before. If you ride down from Barcelona on the old C-31 rather than the motorway, you get the Costes del Garraf, the road that clings to the limestone cliffs between Castelldefels and Sitges in a long series of tight bends above the water. It is narrow, often busy with cyclists and camper vans, and the guardrails are not generous, so treat it as a sightseeing road rather than a racetrack. Beyond Sitges the coast flattens, the road gets duller and the town names start blurring together; Cunit is a good full stop.
The surrounding district, the Baix Penedès, has more depth than its beaches suggest. A short ride inland brings you into the vineyards of the Penedès, the heartland of cava, with low ridges and stone farmhouses. Just along the coast at Sant Salvador, beside El Vendrell, the cellist Pau Casals had his seaside house, now a museum devoted to him. In Calafell there is a reconstructed Iberian citadel built on the site of a real settlement, one of the better places in Catalonia to get a sense of who lived on this coast before the Romans.
Fuel, food and cafés are all in town, and on summer evenings the beach bars stay open late. Wind can be a factor: the afternoon sea breeze is pleasant, but a strong garbí from the south-west can make the exposed coast road gusty. Spring and autumn are the sweet seasons, when the Garraf is quieter, the light is clear and the sea is still warm enough for a swim to rinse off the day.