From Inside

The view from my room in the beautiful new, Frank Gehry-designed Marques de Riscal hotel. Obscured only occasionally by the sheets of snow that slide down the undulating titanium roof and crash to the ground below.

Where not to stay in Barcelona

Travel writers rarely get to complain, at least not in print. Newspaper travel sections and glossy magazines exist to entice people to go places and spend money, not convince them to stay home and horde their cash. So you learn pretty quickly that editors want snazzy and upbeat, not depressing and whiny.

But that's the beauty of a blog.

I was in Barcelona this week, and since my favorite hotel (favorite when I'm paying, that is; otherwise it's no contest) was booked, I decided to try a new place, the Hotel Olivia Plaza.

That's it above. Looks nice, right? In some ways it was: good location smack in the Plaza de Catalunya. Stylish, not too expensive, and the chenille coverlets are a nice touch. But trust me when I say that these people have no idea what they're doing.

I suspect they decided to open a hip little hotel without ever stopping to think that someone might actually stay there. How else to explain the stained floor coverings (made of some unrecognizable material that felt like woven plastic) in a hotel that has only been open for six months? How else to make sense of the fancy, plate-sized showerhead...surrounded by a huge mold stain? The sophisticated track lights dim nicely, but won't actually turn off unless you take your key card out of the slot. Which means, of course, that you can't turn them on again without slapping around blindly in the dark in search first of your keycard and then the damn slot. See those hipster-retro globe lamps hanging by the bed there? Turn the air conditioning on, and the current will keep them knocking into each other all night. Add a maid who, without knocking, lets herself into the room at 8:00 am while you are dressing, and you have an all around bang-up experience.

Did I mention that there are no soap dishes? Nice little toiletry sets, but no place to put the soap. Which, being the exact size and shape of a golf ball, rolls.

Barcelona, Hotels,Olivia Plaza

Yes, Manolete, There is a God

 
"It's going to be a 24-7, three-dimensional experience," said Trevor Horwell, chief hotels officer for Hard Rock International. "You're going to have moods happening within the rooms, vibes going on within the restaurant and another vibe in the bar."

Vibes within vibes. Just the thing for a hotel that used to house bullfighters like Manolete and their retinues before and after corridas at Las Ventas--a sixth-floor suite functioned as the dressing room where they would don their trajes de luces. Just what the Plaza de Santa Ana, one of the most delightful squares in Old Madrid, needed. The corporate lackies at Hard Rock International tried to pass off their transformation of the once-famous Reina Victoria Hotel as sophisticated. I guess that someone realized that perhaps mirrors etched with David Bowie lyrics and pillowcases decorated with Hendrix-style guitars fell a little short of hip.

But happy day, Hard Rock Hotel Madrid is not to be. The hotel's owner, the Tryp corporation, backed out of the partnership earlier this month. The reason, they said, was because the Hard Rock brand was about to be sold to another company. But I like this quote from Tryp's Dommunications Director. "No one really understood what being a Hard Rock Hotel meant." Least of all Manolete. 

Staying: Madrid

I spent my first night in Madrid, back in the early 1980s, in a small pension still thoroughly stuck in the Franco era. The rooms were dark, the owners severe, and the “private bath” turned out to be a raised platform with a drain, located right in the middle of the room. I took one shower, flooded the place, and was forced to flee in shame. From there, I moved to another pension, this one located right off the Plaza Mayor. The beds were concave and slightly damp, the shared bathroom just this side of filthy, but the twin dwarf brothers who owned the place were friendly, and they offered me a small, greasy glass of wine each evening when I returned.

Mostly I stayed there because the place cost about 4 bucks a night, which pretty much won me the accommodations category in those latenight bullshit sessions with fellow backpackers. But even when I became a bit more upwardly mobile, I learned that Madrid’s more expensive hotels weren’t all that much better. Of course, the very top end—the Ritz, the Palace—were lovely, ornate places. But most mid-range accommodations throughout the 80s and 90s were dreary at best and subject to unfamiliar standards of cleanliness at worst.

It’s all different now. I’ve written about some of the city’s great new hotels here and here and here, but I’m beginning to lose track of them all. In the last couple of weeks alone, three of the more stylish chains-- Petit Palace, AC, and Vincci—have opened delightful new hotels that combine sleek accommodations with classic Madrid architecture. And more are on the way.

Travel, Madrid