Hotel Hospes Maricel & Spa

Hotel Hospes Maricel & Spa

On the coast road out of Palma, past Illetas and into Cas Català, ten minutes from the cathedral and close enough to the airport to make the last flight, a stone building built as a hotel in 1949 by Victorio Luzuriaga and designed by the Mallorcan architect Francesc Casas Llompart still faces the Mediterranean from a low outcrop of rock, its neo-classical entrance and neo-Gothic capitals cut from sandstone trucked in from Santanyí. For decades after its opening it became one of the island's most fashionable nightclubs, the kind of place where the old-school jet set gathered before the word boutique meant anything. It reopened as Hospes Maricel & Spa under the Spanish Hospes group, with a modern annex, the Natura building, added across a private tunnel and designed by the architect Xavier Claramunt in local marès stone. The Palace holds 29 rooms, the Natura building 22, 51 in total, and the interior designer Tomás Alía was brought in more recently to redraw the Palace guest rooms, softening what had become a slightly dated grandeur without erasing it. Inside, the two buildings read as two different decades in conversation, the Palace with its stone arches and sea-facing balconies, the Natura wing lower and more minimal, exposed stone walls, private terraces, some rooms with their own plunge pool. The Bodyna Spa is built directly into the property's natural sea caves, stone arches suspended over the water, with indoor and outdoor pools, a hot tub, sauna and Turkish bath. The Maricel Restaurant serves Balearic cooking with contemporary turns, local seafood, a breakfast that took the title of Best Breakfast in the World at the Madrid Fusión Gastronomy Summit, and a bar where live jazz plays most evenings. There is a private jetty, with Calanova Sailing Club thirty metres along the coast, and four meeting rooms that keep the hotel in steady use for business groups alongside its leisure guests. What it feels like is a private residence that has been allowed to keep its temperament, the terrace closed off from the road above and open entirely to the sea below, an infinity pool that appears to run straight into the Mediterranean, and a pace that suits people who want to read on a sun lounger for six hours without anyone asking if they're enjoying their stay. It suits couples wanting old-school seaside formality rather than a design hotel's studied minimalism, and it suits business travellers whose meetings end at 4pm and whose afternoons don't. Service does not always match the setting; reviews from past guests describe standards that dip below what a five-star seafront property usually promises, more a grand old house running slightly informally than a machine tuned for luxury. You should not come if you're travelling with children aged two to twelve between May and October, when the hotel restricts them, or if you want a boutique hotel with the kind of considered editorial restraint that leaves nothing to chance, since the service here can feel more old-school than polished. You should come for the caves turned into spa rooms, the breakfast, and a pool terrace that does more work than most five-star budgets manage. The short version: A 51-room hotel in Cas Català, ten minutes from Palma, built in 1949 by Francesc Casas Llompart and extended with a stone annex by Xavier Claramunt, known for its cave spa and an award-winning breakfast.