We already talked about it when we visited the Hotel España for the eighth chapter, and we return to it to discover another establishment: the Peninsular. A hotel with a lot of history, and with many stories, which in a way is an exception in the city's hotel landscape: it has remained faithful to the past, has not succumbed to modernization plans or price increases, and preserves one of the most surprising patios in Barcelona.
I start with the patio, because that's what stays with you. You enter through number 34, next to the Liceu, you cross a reception that doesn't particularly boast, although you notice it has its years, and after a first flight of stairs, you have three floors of open galleries, all the rooms overlooking the same void and a huge skylight above. The floors are hydraulic mosaic, the baseboards are green, and the railings are cast iron and wood. It looks like a cloister... and it's no coincidence.
And it is that on this plot there were friars, although the story has more twists than almost all guides tell. After 1714, when Barcelona falls and the Ciutadella is built, the Augustinian convent of Sant Agustí de la Ribera is mutilated. The order moves to the Raval and builds another, which resists until the fire of the Sant Jaume bullanga of 1835.
Thirty years later, the building that today houses the Peninsular is built, which respects the idea of the large patio with the rooms around it: where there used to be cells, now there are rooms. The church, however, remains standing, wall to wall. From the rooftop you can almost touch its stained glass windows, and around you rise several recognizable bell towers, such as those of Pi, La Mercè, or the cathedral. Beyond, you can distinguish the W hotel, the Barceló Raval, the enormous Colón building, the cable car towers, and, in the distance, Tibidabo and the MNAC.
In the basement, there was also a tunnel that connected the old convent with the church. It's still there, but you can't get to it: the access was covered up. We are left with that, with a half-told story.
In the entrance hall, a beautiful restaurant sign can be seen, although today the Peninsular only serves breakfast to its guests. And that's because, before being a hotel, the building was a restaurant, with a luxury chef: Prudenci Bros, who had cooked for Isabel II. Between 1875 and 1877, some Italians who worked at the Fonda Oriente on La Rambla (we will talk about it in a future chapter) decided to set up on their own and converted it into a guesthouse. Among them, a certain Francesco Totti, with the same name as the famous Roma and Italian national team footballer. We don't know if there's a family connection, but the coincidence deserved a line.
The hotel venture worked: with visitors to the 1888 Universal Exposition, in need of accommodation, it went wonderfully for them. In 1889, they advertised an establishment 'expressly built for an inn,' with large apartments for families and Spanish and French cuisine. In 1909, the company had already dissolved, and the house passed to Regàs, Badó, and Maulini, who renovated it with that discreet modernism that is admired today. There is no signature of Gaudí or Domènech here; that was in the old inn, today Hotel España, a few numbers away and on the opposite sidewalk.
With the new ownership, the hotel reached 90 rooms, which came in very handy for accommodating visitors to Barcelona's other great event: the 1929 International Exposition. Like so many establishments in the city, in the early years of the Civil War, the Peninsular was also used for non-hospitality purposes due to the special needs of a city resisting the 1936 coup and being dragged into war. The subsequent recovery was slow, and there were several changes of ownership. Other establishments gained the favor of travelers, and this one, which had been highly appreciated in the first decades of the 20th century, lost its luster rapidly. Even so, some advertisements from the early 1950s spoke of 'careful cuisine' and 70 rooms and 40 bathrooms.
In the sixties, the business was in decline and it was bought by the Herrero-Catalán family, originally from Teruel, like many hoteliers who made a career in the center of Barcelona in the middle of the last century. Today, the Peninsular is run by two cousins, Silvia Catalán and Àlex Herrero, the third generation of a family that does not give up its home, no matter how many offers it has received. Silvia still doesn't know if the next generation will want to stay in the business, and she is surprised that we include her hotel in the series alongside so many illustrious names in the city.
And the truth, and now it's time to briefly talk about the philosophy of this series, is that, if we had only focused on those flashy hotels, the previous 27 chapters would have been too easy. In Hotels with History we started with a two-star and have gone through five-star and Grand Luxury establishments, but also family hotels and new-build ones. The important thing is that they are part of the city's history and that all kinds of stories have been lived in them.
One of those stories marked all the hotels in Barcelona and everyone remembers it: the 2020 pandemic. The Peninsular closed and did so by bricking up doors and windows, for fear of it being occupied. For two years, its facade was one of the most photographed images of the city at a standstill. It held on because there was no mortgage or rent to pay: without that advantage, they say, it would have been impossible. It reopened on February 10, 2022. Silvia admits that it was a unique stage and that she would never have imagined that, for something 'that was not a war', they would be without guests for so long. 'When they could, the large establishments reopened with unthinkable prices and it made no sense for us to reopen when we could have done so,' she acknowledges.
The curious thing, returning to the interior of the hotel, is that the patio has no heritage protection. It is modernist, it is beautiful and no author is listed, and no law prevents anyone from changing it. In a city that has torn down modernist buildings or even murals by great artists, that is scary. Today the patio stands thanks to a family that loves their home and their livelihood very much, and that's all.
There are other things: the marble staircase that preserves the hooks where gas lamps hung, the checkered floor, the wooden details, and even the box for room keys. But what I talk about when I talk about this hotel is how they have taken care of it without retouching it. You enter, go up a couple of floors, lean on the railing, and you don't know if you are in 1865, 1920, or 2026.
From the street, you can't imagine what's inside: some flags and a sign with green letters on a white background, Hotel Peninsular. A historic place frozen in time, with reasonably moderate prices for being right in the center and in a sector where rates have skyrocketed.
Today, customers from all over the world continue to arrive, who, looking for their room, walk fascinated through galleries full of hanging plants, on the same plot where long, long ago, Augustinian friars walked in silence.