1919

Originally opened as the Ritz Barcelona in 1919, and for decades the city's single most opulent address, the hotel has since been renamed and thoroughly renovated but has never quite shaken the grand proportions and Belle Époque character that the original Ritz name implied. Nor has it tried to. The Garden restaurant's glass ceiling floods the dining room with natural light in a way few Barcelona interiors manage, and the cocktail bar channels a 1920s atmosphere that feels lived-in rather than manufactured for the purpose. 120 rooms on the Gran Via, in a city not short of grand hotels but rarely one with this particular pedigree.

1918

The Majestic has occupied its position on the Passeig de Gràcia, Barcelona's grandest boulevard, flanked by Gaudí's Casa Batlló and Casa Milà within a few hundred metres in either direction, since 1918. Four generations of the Soldevila-Casals family have run it since, and that unbroken family ownership gives the hotel a warmth the international chains further down the same street have never quite managed to replicate. 271 rooms, the MALATS tapas bar for the kind of unfussy Catalan cooking that grand hotels rarely bother with, and a rooftop terrace with pool and views clear across to the Sagrada Família.

1930

During the Second World War, neutral Portugal became Europe's espionage capital, and the Palácio Estoril was its headquarters. British and German spies drank in the same bar, played baccarat at the casino next door, and tried to eavesdrop on each other through hidden microphones. One of those spies was a young British Naval Intelligence officer named Ian Fleming, who watched a double agent named Dušan Popov wager a fortune at the baccarat table — and twelve years later turned the scene into Casino Royale. The Spy Bar still serves a 007 Martini. Opened in 1930, with 161 rooms, and a guest ledger that reads like an intelligence dossier crossed with the Almanach de Gotha.

1891

Winston Churchill came to paint. George Bernard Shaw came to learn the tango. The hotel has clung to its clifftop above the Atlantic on the island of Madeira since 1891, when a Scottish entrepreneur named William Reid built the palace he had spent his life dreaming of. He died the year before it opened. The gardens, cascading down the cliff to the sea, are subtropical and extravagant, and the terrace is one of those settings that photographs cannot quite capture. 158 rooms and a sense of transatlantic gentility that has survived every fashion since the Victorian era.

1870

Tucked into Lisbon's embassy quarter on a hill above the river, the Lapa Palace was originally a 19th-century palace before its conversion to a hotel. The diplomatic neighbourhood gives it a quietness that the more central Lisbon hotels cannot offer, and the terraced gardens create the sense of a private estate rather than a public hotel. The heated outdoor pool, surrounded by palms, overlooks the Tagus and the 25 de Abril Bridge. 109 rooms and the atmosphere of a retreat for people who already know Lisbon well enough to want its pleasures without its noise. LHW member.

1907

The Valle-Flôr Palace was built in 1907 by a Portuguese marquis who spent so lavishly on the interiors — gilt ceilings, hand-painted frescoes, stained glass, marble everywhere — that he earned the nickname “The King of Diamonds.” The palace is now classified as a Portuguese National Monument. The gardens, with their centuries-old trees and views across the Tagus, are among the finest in Lisbon. 193 rooms, LHW member, and the most architecturally extravagant hotel in a city not short on architectural extravagance.

1910

César Ritz himself supervised the construction, and King Alfonso XIII opened the doors in 1910 — making this the only hotel in the world that a reigning monarch personally inaugurated. A comprehensive renovation by Mandarin Oriental (reopened 2021) modernised the interiors while preserving the Belle Époque bones. 153 rooms on the Paseo del Prado, directly opposite the Prado Museum, and a garden terrace that on a warm Madrid evening is one of the finest outdoor dining spots in the city.

1932

S'Agaró was conceived in the 1920s as a planned resort town on the Costa Brava, a Catalan answer to the Côte d'Azur, built from scratch by a single visionary developer, and La Gavina was designed from the outset to be its centrepiece. Ava Gardner stayed. Orson Welles was a regular, drawn as much by the discretion as the setting. The hotel sits within a private Mediterranean garden overlooking a sheltered cove, and the atmosphere owes more to a private seaside villa than to any commercial hotel of comparable size. 74 rooms, and a sense of midcentury Mediterranean glamour that four generations of ownership have never allowed to fade.

1912

Every September, the San Sebastián International Film Festival descends on this Belle Époque hotel and turns it, briefly, into the most glamorous address in the Basque Country: directors and actors spilling out of screenings and straight into the bar to argue about what they've just seen. The hotel opened in 1912 on the banks of the River Urumea, named after the Spanish Queen Regent who lent it her patronage, and the rest of the year it settles back into serving the Basque Country's famously food-obsessed clientele. 136 rooms, a Luxury Collection property, and a city many consider to have the finest food culture anywhere in Europe. The María Cristina makes a strong case for being its finest address to match.

1928

Built for the 1929 Ibero-American Exhibition, the Alfonso XIII is the architectural embodiment of Seville distilled into a single building: Mudéjar arches, hand-painted azulejo tiles, wrought-iron balconies, and a central courtyard with a fountain that appears to have been designed for the express purpose of drinking sherry beside it at dusk. The hotel was commissioned by King Alfonso XIII himself, who wanted Seville to have a hotel worthy of receiving royalty, and it has been receiving it ever since. 151 rooms, a Luxury Collection property, and a position within walking distance of the Alcázar, the cathedral, and the Giralda tower that makes sightseeing feel almost redundant.