There is a neighborhood in Barcelona that many Barcelonans know by name, although few have truly set foot in it. It does not appear on tourist circuits, it has no chain hotels or terraces with DJs, and its streets are silent at ten at night. It is called Les Tres Torres, and it is, according to the Institut d'Estadística de Catalunya, the neighborhood with the highest average income in all of Catalonia. Hotel Primero Primera is here. This is chapter 18 of Hotels with History, the series we publish every fortnight in The New Barcelona Post, and to understand why this hotel exists, one must first understand who lives in this neighborhood and how it came to be what it is.
The name comes from three brothers from Sants (the Romaní i Climent Mas) who, at the beginning of the 20th century, built three stately residences here, one for each. Three towers. The toponym took root and the neighborhood began to urbanize at the pace of the Sarrià train, which had already connected Plaça de Catalunya with the old municipality since 1860. The industrial bourgeoisie of Barcelona, tired of the noise and smoke of the city center, discovered that they could live surrounded by greenery and with views of Collserola without being too far from the office.
It is worth remembering that Les Tres Torres was part of Sarrià, and that Sarrià... was not Barcelona. It was an independent municipality with almost a thousand years of documented history that resisted annexation with a tenacity that no other town on the plain had: while Gràcia, Sants, or Sant Gervasi were incorporated in 1897, Sarrià held out for twenty-four more years. When the royal decree arrived in November 1921, communicated to the local City Council with only one day's notice to prevent organized resistance, the residents closed their businesses, gathered at the Spring cinema on Passeig de la Bonanova, and drafted a manifesto stating that the town complied with the decree but did not abdicate its identity.
Among the families who had most opposed the annexation were the Girona, the Güell, and (in a nod to our Red Thread that regular readers will recognize) the Godó, the same ones who built Casa Mimosa on Pau Claris street, protagonist of chapter 17 of the series. Barcelona, as always, is a handkerchief.
Of that resistance, something intangible but real remains. Les Tres Torres does not have the rigidity of Cerdà's grid: its streets are more irregular, its buildings lower, its gardens more generous. It operates with the discretion of someone who doesn't need to prove anything. And that clearly distinguishes it from Pedralbes, its most famous neighbor. Pedralbes has more monuments and more silence. Les Tres Torres, on the other hand, has civic life: a market, neighborhood bars, children on bicycles, and neighbors who know each other by name. It's the luxury that is hardest to achieve in a big city: to seem like a village.
A house before a hotel
In this setting, in 1955, Carlos Pérez-Sala built a building on Doctor Carulla street. With a granite and Pyrenean slate facade that had an almost sentimental meaning: the family spent summers in the mountains, and he wanted the stone to remind them of it all year round in Barcelona. The idea was simple: to live on the main floor with his wife and eight children, and to rent the rest of the floors to long-term guests. Unbeknownst to him, he was experimenting with what six decades later would be called boutique hospitality.
What no one could have foreseen is that the matriarch lived on that first floor until the end of her life. She passed away last year, at 104 years old, without having moved from there since 1955. There are hotels that say they make you feel like a home. At Primero Primera, it was not a metaphor. The name isn't either. Primero Primera is the exact address where the family lived: first floor, first door. An address that became an identity when in 2011 Javier Pérez-Sala, one of Carlos's sons, promoted the conversion of the building into a hotel with an implicit condition: that it should not stop looking like a home.
The thirty rooms, each different, with vintage furniture from the fifties, travel objects, and family pieces, are proof that there was no desire to erase the past. The interior design, by Núria Pérez-Sala and Ana Galofré, sought the aesthetic of a private English club: woods, leathers, carpets, and natural light. On the ground floor, the restaurant bearing this name has become a destination for both neighborhood residents and hotel guests. From the outside, the building is difficult to read as a hotel and not as a private house. Which was, exactly, what was sought.
Primero Primera was the first. Then came the Sixties at the foot of the Colón building, near the Maritime Museum, and the Casa Sagnier on Rambla de Catalunya, and there is a fourth under construction in Pelai/Rambla. The three now form the group 70K Hotels. The name comes from afar: Javier was eighteen when he made a 70,000-kilometer trip on a Yamaha XT. Decades later, when it was time to name the project, the number was still what best defined them. The engine, in this family, appears everywhere.
The engine as a family heritage
If there is something that makes Primero Primera impossible to imitate, it is not the interior design. It is the surname. The Pérez-Salas are one of those compound surnames from Barcelona that are pronounced in full, as a single word, and that carry an implicit social universe. Businessmen, mountain vacationers, and discreet patrons. But what made them popular beyond the circles of the high bourgeoisie was the engine. Luis Pérez-Sala arrived in Formula 1 in 1988 with the Minardi team alongside Adrián Campos, forming for the first time a pair of Spanish drivers in the same team in the premier category of motorsport. Minardi was exactly the opposite of a big team: small, modest, loved by fans precisely for that reason.
With that material, Luis did what he could. And in the 1989 British Grand Prix, he finished sixth. One point. The first that a Spanish driver had scored in Formula 1 since the fifties. A feat that the Spanish press barely celebrated, perhaps because there was still no vocabulary to explain what it meant to score in F1 with a Minardi. After F1, Luis did not stay away from the paddock: Spanish Touring Car Champion in 1991 and 1993, Team Principal of the HRT team in 2012, and more recently at the forefront of the rebirth of Hispano Suiza, the legendary Barcelona brand commissioned by the Suqué Mateu family. The engine, for the Pérez-Salas, is not a hobby. It is a way of understanding the world.
The saga continues. Daniel Juncadella, Luis's nephew, won the Macau Grand Prix Formula 3 in 2011 (the first for a Spaniard in that race) and was European F3 champion the following year, which earned him a ride in a Formula 1 Ferrari, becoming the fourth Spaniard to do so. Today he competes in endurance racing at the highest level, with victories in the 24 Hours of Spa and Daytona, and on May 17 he raced in the 24 Hours of Nürburgring alongside Max Verstappen. A mechanical breakdown, after having led the race all night, prevented them from winning. Inside the hotel that stars in this chapter, dozens of photographs and memories of races like this explain it better than any text.
On Doctor Carulla street, the stone from the Pyrenees is still the same as in 1955. And on the first floor, the lady who built everything looked at that garden for seventy years. There are stories that cannot be bought or reproduced. They are only inherited, and if anything, they are told in articles like this.