Hospes Palau de la Mar

It’s time the world discovered there’s more to urban Spain than Barcelona and Madrid: Spain’s third city is heating up, with travelers from the UK in particular discovering Valencia in record numbers, and budget airlines scrambling to establish routes from all over Europe.

New hotels are appearing all the time, and one of the most noteworthy, to our eye, is the Hotel Palau del Mar, from the new nationwide Hospes group. Two 19th-century Palacete buildings have been stitched together and transformed into Valencia’s first five-star luxury boutique.

The style is utterly modern luxury, with stunning interiors in monochrome white fabrics and rich dark woods, with flat-screen televisions on the walls and sprawling bathrooms behind sliding doors. At just sixty-six rooms, oriented about central courtyards, the Palau del Mar is intimate, and quiet too, feeling less like a city hotel and more like a resort, complete with basement spa, offering a steam room and sauna in addition to an eye-popping plunge pool, set into a backdrop of dark stone.

Some stylish hotels feel a bit flimsy, but this is substantive luxury through and through, without any of the Regency furnishings or antique fabrics that usually serve as signifiers of the high life.

As for the city itself, you’re positioned at the edge of the historic city center, as near the old market as to the new designer shops. The new City of Arts and Sciences complex ensures that architecture freaks will come to see Valencia as Santiago Calatrava’s city, in much the same way that Barcelona is Gaudí’s town, or Bilbao in some small sense Gehry’s. And if you’re here to see some cutting-edge design, the Palau de la Mar may be the only hotel that measures up—there would be something inauthentic about walking over one of Calatrava’s bridges, only to check into a dismal chain hotel.