Hotel Villa Soro

San Sebastián is not quite at the top of the list for Spanish destinations, but it’s hard to say why. Perhaps it’s that those few tourists who venture north find themselves at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, but everyone, it seems, is missing out on a perfectly shaped bay and some extraordinary cooking, a cuisine that even the Catalonian super-chef Ferran Adrià counts as the finest in Europe, with the Michelin stars to prove it—the city is home to no fewer than seven starred restaurants.

Hotel Villa Soro sits outside San Sebastián’s old town, slightly removed from the bustling shopping and entertainment districts, tucked away on a tree-lined residential street, in a stately 19th-century mansion — a listed historic landmark — and its English-style brick carriage house, surrounded by a French landscape garden that dates back to the mansion’s birth. Here you’re just a 20-minute walk from the Parte Vieja and five minutes from the beach at Zurriola.

Guest rooms are elegant, fitting the grandeur of the old mansion, yet more contemporary, sacrificing no comforts in pursuit of traditional authenticity. Instead one finds spacious white marble baths and individually designed bedrooms, decorated in a sedately luxurious style, with plenty of natural light and contemporary artworks by local artists. All the trappings of modern hospitality are in evidence: satellite TV and internet access are universal.

The one thing Villa Soro lacks is a hotel restaurant, which is actually something of a mixed blessing: there’s no need to try to get by on hotel food when visiting one of the world’s culinary capitals. Instead of chefs Villa Soro relies upon its concierges to guide the guests to the best of the city’s restaurants, a feat that cynics might say would be just as easily accomplished by throwing darts at the phone book, given San Sebastián’s surfeit of fine choices. Then again darts are rarely of use in securing a reservation…