There are few world-renowned five-star Grand Luxe hotels, or those belonging to the prestigious association of The Leading Hotels of the World, that are an inn. The name does not make the place. Whoever enters the establishment without knowing where they are going (lately this is almost impossible, like blind dates) does not understand that an establishment of this category, and in this place, has the qualification of an inn, something that the owning family has wanted to maintain over time. La Gavina is an inn (and what an inn!) when it could perfectly be called Gran Hotel de la Gavina... and that has not happened, because it has always been this way: Gavina, and not Gaviota, not even in the harshest times of Franco's regime, when Catalan was not exactly a friendly language for those in power.
To understand La Gavina as an inn, one must understand the Ensesa family: its former owners, and also its current ones. One must also understand that, despite having 74 rooms today (53 doubles and 21 suites), its capacity was not always this, and when it was born it was, more than a hotel, the happy idea of a father and son who didn't quite know what to do with two houses that had remained unsold.
A flour industrialist, a son obsessed with a piece of coast
The story begins, like so many great hotel initiatives in Spain, with a business that had nothing to do with lodging anyone. Josep Ensesa Pujades, an industrialist from Girona dedicated to flour and chemical products, had acquired, in the early 1920s, a corner of the coastline between Sant Pol bay and Sa Conca beach, a piece of coast then uninhabited, better known for serving as an animal burial ground than for anything else. Ensesa Pujades already operated some rudimentary "S'Agaró baths" there that attracted, by bus and steamship, bathers from Girona and tourists from Barcelona.
However, it was his son, Josep Ensesa i Gubert, who saw in that place something more than a seasonal business. Together with the architect Rafael Masó i Valentí, in 1924 he conceived what today we would call, without exaggeration, a visionary urban project: a garden city facing the Mediterranean, designed for art, business, and good society to meet with style. That was named S'Agaró, and its first piece, the Loggia de Senya Blanca (residence of the Ensesa family themselves, whose name was given by local fishermen because it served as a visual reference when there was no other building in the place), was built in the early 1920s.
Ensesa and Masó left nothing to chance. Every plot buyer in the new development had to submit to a strict set of conditions: no house could exceed nine meters in height, so that all would retain sea views; no plot could be less than one thousand square meters; only one-seventh of the land could be built upon, and all construction or renovation required the approval of the development's architect. This almost obsessive zeal to preserve the landscape, unusual in Spain at the time, and not to mention much of it now, is the reason why S'Agaró still looks, a century later, an impeccable place frozen in time.
Two houses that no one bought
La Gavina, an establishment that has ended up being the jewel in that crown, was not born, however, as a hotel. It consisted of two twin houses, conceived to look like a single large villa, which the developers of the urbanization failed to sell. It was Josep Ensesa i Gubert who convinced his father to give them another use, and so, with eleven rooms and a restaurant, the Hostal de La Gavina opened its doors on January 2, 1932 (some date the inauguration a day later, January 3, according to family accounts). A place that then charged 25 pesetas daily for full board.
The name was not casual or minor: it was called "hostal", and not "hotel" much less "gran hotel", with the deliberate intention that this place would preserve a familiar, homely treatment, almost like a residence of friends that opens to a few privileged guests. Almost a century after that nominal decision, the Ensesa family continues to not want to change it, even though the establishment became, over time, the first five-star Grand Luxe in Catalonia and the first in Spain admitted to the Leading Hotels of the World club, a distinction that would arrive in 1962.
The first renovation of the building, to adapt it from a chalet to a hotel, was signed by Rafael Masó himself, who also designed the tennis courts. Masó died in 1935, before seeing his creation fully grow, and after the Civil War, Francesc Folguera took charge of the works in S'Agaró and completely transformed the building, of which today barely a corridor of Masó's original work remains standing.
The Gaviota that never was
We mentioned earlier, almost in passing, an anecdote that better than any other portrays the character of the house and its owners. After the Civil War, with Catalan proscribed from public life and the Francoist authorities determined to Castilianize everything that sounded like a vernacular language, someone proposed renaming the hostal "La Gaviota". It was Josep Ensesa Pujades himself who managed to stop that nonsense, and he did so, they explain, with an argument as simple as it was effective: that "gavina" was also a word from old Castilian, so there was nothing to translate. The hostal continued to be called Gavina in the harshest years of the regime, and it has continued to be called that ever since. It is not a minor detail: in a place accustomed to luxury being measured in marbles and Murano lamps, the true distinction of La Gavina has always been this silent stubbornness to preserve its name, its scale and its homely treatment, against any temptation of grandiloquence.
The other great dream of the Costa Brava: Cap Sa Sal and the Andreu
It is convenient, having arrived here, to open a parenthesis, because La Gavina did not invent the luxury of the Costa Brava alone, although it was the one who best knew how to make it last. Thirty years after the Ensesa family opened their eleven-room guesthouse, another great family of the Catalan upper bourgeoisie, the Andreu family, built an even larger and bolder hotel in Begur, on the cliff of Cap Sa Sal, between the coves of Sa Tuna and Aiguafreda. Eight years of construction, a private pier to receive guests by sea, a discotheque, a ballroom, five restaurants, three bars and even a flamenco cave where La Chunga regularly performed: this was Cap Sa Sal, which opened its doors in July 1963 with 230 rooms and suites, designed by the architect Josep Maria Bosch Aymerich, with gardens by Rubió i Tudurí.
During the sixties and a good part of the seventies, Cap Sa Sal was the other social pole of gravity of the Costa Brava, the place where Julio Iglesias or Lola Flores performed in summer for celebrities and even heads of state. The establishment in Begur was a destination that competed in glamour with La Gavina without needing to imitate it, because its vocation was exactly the opposite: not the familiar and discreet house of the Ensesa family, but the large avant-garde resort, almost a small high-level holiday city overlooking the Mediterranean. But the Andreu family's dream did not withstand the change in the tourist cycle of the seventies, nor the challenge of sustaining a complex of such dimensions, and in 1979 the hotel closed forever, later converted into a community of apartments.
That Cap Sa Sal has only survived in postcards and in the memory of those who danced there, while La Gavina continues to open its doors every season since 1932, is not a simple twist of fate, but rather the proof, by contrast, of that intuition that Josep Ensesa i Gubert had: that in luxury, sometimes, prudence lasts longer than spectacularity. The two hotels, each in its own way, marked an unrepeatable era of the Costa Brava; only one of them managed to make that era never quite end.
Ava Gardner, a discussion and other Hollywood sins
If something consecrated La Gavina in the international imagination, it was cinema. In 1950, the filming of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, by Albert Lewin, starring Ava Gardner, arrived in S'Agaró. The cast stayed at the inn, and from those nights of filming, a romance arose between the actress and the Catalan bullfighter, actor, and poet Mario Cabré. Frank Sinatra, then Gardner's partner, showed up in S'Agaró in a fury and starred, in the same bar at La Gavina, in the argument with his girlfriend that society chroniclers from half the world eagerly reported. Cabré, heartbroken, dedicated some verses to Ava in his poetic diary from that same 1950 that posterity, with more glamour than rigor, has almost turned into a local legend.
It was not the only memorable incident. In 1959, while Suddenly, Last Summer was being filmed in the area, Elizabeth Taylor had the idea of lying down, with her swimsuit still soaked with seawater, on a valuable bedspread in one of the rooms. The hotel management, faithful to that domestic rigor that the Ensesa family never abandoned even with their most illustrious guests, did not think twice: the actress, none other than Elizabeth Taylor, was politely invited to leave. At La Gavina, not even Hollywood was above the bedding.
Nor was there ever a lack of rigor in dress code. For years, not even the most suffocating and humid heat of S'Agaró's summer spared guests at hotel parties from attending in a jacket and tie, an unwritten but unappealable rule that coexisted, without any contradiction, with the close and almost private home treatment that was the establishment's hallmark. Luxury, at La Gavina, always had this double face: informality in substance and etiquette in form.
Over time, the anecdotes have become almost as valuable as the house's artistic heritage.
Because through La Gavina, in addition to movie stars, practically everyone who has been someone in the last century has passed through: John Wayne, Sean Connery, Peter Sellers and Britt Ekland, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Liam Neeson, Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Charles Chaplin, Lauren Bacall, Cole Porter... Also the politics and public life of this country: Francesc Macià, Lluís Companys, Manuel Azaña, most of the Francoist ministers, all the presidents of the Generalitat of recent decades, the then princes —later kings— Juan Carlos and Sofia, and later Felipe VI himself. And music, with Charles Aznavour, Julio Iglesias, Tom Waits, Shakira or Lady Gaga among the names that have been seen in its halls. Footballer and coach Johan Cruyff brought his F.C. Barcelona teams there for some pre-seasons. Salvador Dalí, of course, was a guest in these places, because no story of eccentricity and good taste on the Costa Brava can do without his presence.
Four generations without losing the pulse
One truly singular thing about La Gavina, beyond its illustrious guests, is that it continues to be, a century later, the affair of a single family. Josep Ensesa i Gubert, the soul of the original project, was succeeded by his son Josep Ensesa Montsalvatge, and he, by the third generation. Today, the siblings Júlia, Virginia, Carina and Josep Ensesa Viñas are at the helm of the hotel, each with their own area of responsibility, in what the family understands not as a hotel business as usual, but as the administration of a legacy. The longevity of this family management, uncommon in the high luxury sector, is probably the ultimate explanation of why La Gavina has managed to grow (from the initial eleven rooms to those it has today) without ever losing the air of a private home that its founder wanted to give it.
A red thread to the heart of Barcelona
There is a detail that logically escapes anyone who only looks at La Gavina from S'Agaró outwards, and which is worth pulling, because it leads, unintentionally and without seeking it, to the very center of Barcelona. After Francesc Folguera's post-war reconstruction, and upon his death in 1960, it was the architect Adolf Florensa who signed the last major interventions in the hotel, including the current lobby and the Garbí pool: that is, a large part of the physiognomy that any guest who crosses the door still recognizes today.
And it turns out that this same Florensa, municipal architect of Barcelona and one of the great names (discreet and little glossed in guides) of Catalan Noucentista architecture, is the author of two buildings that any traveler today also associates with luxury hotels, although without knowing, perhaps, that they share a signature with La Gavina. One is the old Casa Cambó, the residence that the politician and financier Francesc Cambó had built in 1925 in the middle of Via Laietana, today converted into the Grand Hotel Central. The other is the building, designed by Florensa in 1947 in front of the facade of Barcelona Cathedral, which four years later would house the Hotel Colón, the hotel frequented by Joan Miró, Ernest Hemingway or Tennessee Williams, and which today, after its last renovation, has been renamed Lamaro.
"Next to Sant Pol beach, La Taverna del Mar still stands, today converted into a much-loved restaurant in the area"
Pulling this red thread, it turns out that even from S'Agaró and the Ensesa family, collateral stories emerge: that of an architect who, without intending to, ended up signing three of the corners where several generations of the Barcelona bourgeoisie (and of the whole world, by the way) can feel at home. La Gavina, however, remains the only one of the three that never stopped being called an inn.
The current building, mainly the result of the post-war reconstruction by Francesc Folguera and successive extensions and updates, combines vaulted corridors, changes in level between floors and lounges of an almost domestic neatness, decorated with Flemish tapestries, Romanesque carvings, Murano lamps and Carrara marble bathrooms. In 1967, the saltwater pool was built, presided over from the following year by a Mediterranean Venus in white marble, a work by the sculptor Joan Rebull. A few meters from the main facade begins the Camí de Ronda, a walk of about two kilometers over the rocks between the beaches of Sant Pol and Sa Conca, a personal insistence of Josep Ensesa i Gubert and Masó himself, which today serves both for walking and, in the warm months, for swimming following the buoy line that marks its route. Next to Sant Pol beach, just two hundred meters from the inn, La Taverna del Mar still stands, the old family picnic area from which the entire Ensesa business in the area actually originates, today converted into a much-loved restaurant in the area.
A hostal that did not want to be a grand hotel
At the very end, there remains the question with which this report opens: why La Gavina, being able to be called by any other name more in keeping with its category, continues to be, in its own papers and at its own door, a hostal. The answer, after almost a century, seems to be less in the architecture or in the list of illustrious guests than in a very specific idea that Josep Ensesa i Gubert had in 1932 and that his descendants have not wanted to touch: that true luxury does not consist in the size of the entrance sign, but that whoever crosses that entrance feels, during the days of their stay, at home. All the rest. Like the suites, the marbles, the Hollywood stars or the membership of The Leading Hotels of the World, has arrived as an addition.
La Gavina is already almost a century old, opening its doors every season, without having changed owners or name
Other legendary hotels on the Costa Brava, such as Cap Sa Sal itself, had their moment of splendor and faded with the changing times. La Gavina, on the other hand, is already almost a century old, opening its doors every season, without having changed owners or name, in the same corner of the coast that a father and son dreamed of with more intuition than business plan. The hotel and the urbanization that surrounds it are a truly unique place in the world: there is no other like it, nor does it need to be. The story of this place, in the end, is a beautiful story because it is, above all, the story of a stubbornness: that of never ceasing to be a hostal when it could do so with all the right