Alma Barcelona Hotel

Alma Barcelona Hotel

On the corner of Passeig de Gràcia and Carrer de Mallorca, in the residential heart of the Eixample, the building that houses Alma Barcelona was raised in 1910 for Gonzalo Arnús, founder of Banca Arnús and grandson of the financier Evarist Arnús, one of the figures behind Barcelona's 1888 Universal Exposition, likely to designs by Enric Sagnier, and later served as the Barcelona offices of Solvay Ibérica before Habitan Arquitectos, working with interior designers Nori Furlan and Paco Llonch of Studio Coriumcasa, reopened it as a 72-room hotel in 2008, one of two properties run by AlmaHotels, the company founded in Barcelona in 2005. The building's split identity carries through every room: the Carrer de Mallorca side keeps its early-twentieth-century Eixample face, rasilla tile and stucco intact, while the wing facing the interior garden was rebuilt in glass and steel, the two halves meeting in a seven-storey atrium lit from above. Rooms, each over 50 square metres, come classical, with tile floors and cedar joinery, or contemporary, with clean lines and leather upholstery, and open with a fingerprint, not a card. The garden sits on land the original 1860 Eixample block plan by Ildefons Cerdà set aside as shared green space, and now holds the restaurant Jardín del Alma, whose seasonal Mediterranean menu runs from breakfast through a Sunday brunch open to non-guests; the spa uses white limestone and light dropped in from above, and the rooftop keeps pouring past midnight. It reads as a private address more than a hotel: 72 rooms across seven floors, but no queue at reception and no lobby performance, the kind of scale that lets you forget you are one of many guests. The atrium and the garden do the work other hotels ask a pool or a terrace to do, and the effect, particularly at breakfast among the trees or a late drink upstairs, is closer to borrowing an elegant Eixample apartment than checking into a five-star. It suits the traveller who wants to be minutes from Casa Batlló and La Pedrera without staying inside either of them, who prefers a walled garden to comparing notes with other guests, and who doesn't need spectacle to feel looked after. You should not come if you want the drama of Gaudí's contemporaries reproduced inside your room, if genuinely dark bedrooms unsettle you (the classical rooms lean darker than most), or if a hotel restaurant needs to double as a destination instead of simply being a good, quiet one. You should come for the garden, for a location that puts you inside everything the Eixample does well without asking you to sleep in a landmark, and for a five-star that keeps its restraint even in August. The short version: A 72-room five-star in a 1910 Eixample building on Carrer de Mallorca, split between a classical facade and a glass-and-steel garden wing, run by AlmaHotels since 2008, with a walled garden restaurant and fingerprint-locked rooms.