Vidago Palace Hotel

Vidago Palace Hotel

Trás-os-Montes, which translates as "beyond the mountains," is the part of Portugal that most visitors to Porto never reach, and the name alone explains why it remains so thoroughly itself. The landscape is granite and oak forest, the villages are old and largely untroubled by tourism, the Douro wine region is thirty minutes to the south, and the Spanish border is ten minutes to the east. Vidago Palace is in a small spa town in the middle of all of this, a salmon-pink Belle Époque palace commissioned by King Carlos I and opened in October 1910, the same day the First Portuguese Republic was declared. It was considered the most luxurious hotel on the Iberian Peninsula at the time, and the rumour that its grand staircase inspired the architect of the Titanic is too good to dismiss. The hotel closed in 2006 and reopened in 2010 after an €80 million restoration with interiors by Portuguese designers Diogo Rosa Lã and José Pedro Lopes Vieira, and a striking modernist thermal spa designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Álvaro Siza Vieira. The 70 rooms and suites retain the grandeur of the original building, high ceilings, original chandeliers, silk drapes, and four Grand Suites lined with De Gournay silk wallpaper, while the spa is built entirely in white marble and uses the local mineral waters of Vidago, which have been considered curative since the 19th century, across twenty treatment rooms, five hydro pools, and an indoor pool. The Salão Nobre, the original ballroom with its gilded beams and coffered ceilings, now serves as the fine dining restaurant, northern Portuguese cuisine built around local produce. Breakfast is taken in the Winter Garden, with its black and white marble floor and mezzanine, which is one of the more beautiful rooms in which to start a morning in Portugal. The 18-hole golf course, originally designed by Mackenzie Ross and rebuilt to championship standard, runs through the surrounding parkland. This is a hotel for people drawn to the northern interior of Portugal, the wine country, the historic cities of Guimarães and Chaves, the stillness of a landscape that has not been arranged for visitors. Porto is ninety minutes by car, which is far enough to feel genuinely remote and close enough to be useful. The short version: A 70-room Belle Époque palace in Trás-os-Montes, opened in 1910 and restored in 2010 with a Siza Vieira thermal spa, an 18-hole golf course, and a ballroom turned fine dining restaurant. The grandest address in northern Portugal, and one of the least visited.