Santos Gran Hotel Miramar

Santos Gran Hotel Miramar

On Paseo de Reding, where La Caleta gives way to La Malagueta beach, a white palace built around a polychrome glass dome faces the Mediterranean directly, its main entrance turned toward the water, not the street. Fernando Guerrero Strachan spent five years on it, from 1921 to 1926, and it opened that year as the Hotel Príncipe de Asturias, inaugurated by King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenia on a 13,684 square metre plot that left room for gardens as well as six floors and a basement. It served as a field hospital during the Civil War, from 1936 to 1939, reopened afterward under the shorter name Miramar, closed its doors in 1967, and spent twenty years, from 1987 to 2007, as Málaga's Palace of Justice before Hoteles Santos, the family-run Spanish group that also owns the Balneario Las Arenas in Valencia, took on the restoration in 2014 and reopened the building in 2017 with 190 rooms: 161 bedrooms, 27 suites, and two royal suites, one with a circular bed, the other with a private sea-facing terrace. The restoration architecture is by José Seguí, who recovered the original polychrome dome, the arcaded patio with its marble floor, and the silk-white modernist façade with its ceramic trencadís detailing, while the rooms were designed by Aneta Mijatovic with Rosa Escribano, split across three distinct schemes: Arabic and Al-Andalus, Mediterranean, and a plainer classical register, so a Premier room on one floor reads as a different hotel from a Deluxe Sea room two floors up. Diego Nicás runs the kitchen at Príncipe de Asturias, the first-floor restaurant with the same tall sea-facing windows the original hotel had, built around Iberian produce and a wine list weighted toward Spain; Mediterráneo handles the daily breakfast buffet and an international dinner service, and Media Luna, on the roof, does the cocktails and the view. The spa runs a Moorish-style thermal circuit with a hammam, using Sisley products, and close to 9,000 square metres of subtropical garden does a lot of the work between the beach and the building. What you get is grandeur with a civic memory still visible in the bones, a building that was a hospital and then a courthouse before it was a hotel again, and Hoteles Santos has leaned into that instead of smoothing it over: the crystal reception desk and fresh flower arrangements are new, but the scale of the rooms and the height of the lounges belong to 1926. It suits a traveller who wants central Málaga, the Picasso and Carmen Thyssen museums a five-minute walk away, but wants to come home to a beachfront address with three restaurants and a spa instead of a boutique townhouse in the old town. It is a grand hotel in the old sense, formal at the front desk, generous with space, more interested in scale than intimacy. You should not come if you want a small, owner-attended property where every corner has been thought through individually; the three-style room scheme and the event-heavy gardens, seventeen function rooms, weddings most weekends in season, mean this reads more resort than retreat. You should come for the building itself, for a balcony facing the Mediterranean and a hundred years of Málaga's civic history under the floor, and for a kitchen and spa good enough that you never need to leave the property to eat or unwind well. The short version: A 1926 Fernando Guerrero Strachan palace on Málaga's La Malagueta seafront, restored by Hoteles Santos and reopened in 2017 with 190 rooms across three design schemes, a polychrome glass dome, three restaurants under chef Diego Nicás, and a Moorish spa, five minutes from the Picasso Museum.