Santa Susanna is a small beach town that lives two lives. From June to September it is hotel country — packed promenade, sun loungers, families from half of Europe. From October it exhales into a quiet coastal village of roughly four thousand people that still has the sea, the train and the sand almost to itself. Whether that suits you depends on which version you are moving for. Here is the honest picture.
Santa Susanna is on the north Maresme coast, wedged between Malgrat de Mar and Pineda de Mar, about an hour and fifteen minutes up the R1 line from Barcelona. The town is small and mostly low-rise, with the railway running along the back and the beach along the front, and you can walk from one end to the other without much effort. It borders the Tordera river area to the north, with Blanes and the Costa Brava proper just beyond, so it is the last quiet stretch of the Maresme before the coast turns decidedly touristic.
The seafront is the reason the town exists. Santa Susanna has a little over two kilometres of coarse golden sand, split into a few named stretches: Platja de Llevant by the main promenade, the broader and quieter Platja de les Dunes, and the smaller Platja de les Caletes. There are showers, ramps for pushchairs and wheelchairs, and lifeguards in season. The sand and the promenade run continuously into Pineda on one side and Malgrat on the other, so you can walk the coast for a long way without hitting a dead end. In winter it is just you, the dog walkers and the sea.
Here is the practical part. Santa Susanna has its own station on the R1 line, the same one that threads the whole Maresme coast into Barcelona, which means you do not need a car to reach the city — more than the inland towns can offer. The trade-off is time: the run to Plaça de Catalunya is roughly an hour and fifteen minutes, and a little more to the centre of town. That puts the town firmly in the 'work partly from home' bracket rather than a five-day office commute. By car the C-32 shortens the trip to Barcelona to around fifty minutes off-peak and puts Girona within about forty.
Santa Susanna is one of the more affordable beach towns on the Maresme, well below the Baix Maresme towns closer to Barcelona. The catch is supply: a large share of the housing stock is geared to holiday lets and second homes, so year-round long-term rentals are thinner than in a working town. Expect flats in the low-to-mid teens per square metre when you do find one, with houses and villas at the upper end. Because so much here is seasonal, insist on a proper long-term contract and check the lease type before you commit — the town's holiday character shows up in the paperwork as much as on the beach.
Outside summer, Santa Susanna is quiet and small. There is a health centre and a basic spread of shops, but for anything more you lean on Pineda and Malgrat, minutes away, which have the big supermarkets, the market halls and the secondary schools. Blanes, a little further north, has the hospital. The town has a nautical base for water sports in season and a row of seafront restaurants that fill up in July and thin out by November. It is a place that rewards people who like the off-season sea and are relaxed about using a car or the train for everything else.
Santa Susanna suits couples, remote workers and smaller families who want the sea at a reasonable price and a direct train to Barcelona, and who do not mind a town that goes quiet in winter. It is less obviously a fit for anyone who needs a big international-school scene on the doorstep — those are down the coast — or a busy, year-round social life. The upside is real and simple: a beach town with its own station, cheaper than the Baix Maresme, calm for most of the year. If you want summer energy without paying summer prices twelve months a year, the town's two-faced nature is exactly the point.