L'Avenida Hotel

L'Avenida is a twelve-room hotel in a townhouse built in 1912 on Gran Via, a quiet, tree-lined street a few corners back from Sóller's main square. The house had fallen into ruin before local craftsmen restored its plaster ceilings and rebuilt its marble staircase, and it opened on 1 March 2007 with nine bedrooms. Treguer Collection, a Mallorcan family hotel group, took it on in 2018. It is adults-only, it opens from March to October, and it holds One MICHELIN Key in the current Spain selection.

No two rooms match. The Double Room Standard and the Double Room Garden are 20 m², the garden pair on the ground floor with a table and chairs outside the door. The Duplex puts a lounge and the bathroom below and the bed up a flight of stairs, and the two Superior Doubles, on the first and second floors, keep the original mouldings and face the mountains. The Balcony rooms look over the pool. The Junior Suites, about 30 m² with canopy beds, look west over the garden and pool. The two Luxury Suites, 45 m² on the street front, have high ceilings, four-poster beds, roll-top baths and double showers, and the second-floor one looks across Gran Via to Puig Major. Leather headboards, patterned wallpaper and wenge floors sit against the house's own limestone arches and beams.

What it is chosen for is the way it puts you inside Sóller rather than next to it. Breakfast, a buffet with eggs cooked to order, is served by the pool in the courtyard garden. There is lunch but no dinner, so evenings belong to the town, and the staff will book your tables before you land. The square is four minutes on foot. The wooden tram, running since 1913, leaves from in front of the station, five minutes away, for the half-hour run to the port, and the train, running since 1912, climbs through thirteen tunnels to Palma in about an hour. Biniaraix, where the old stone path up the Barranc de Biniaraix begins, is half an hour's walk.

The trade is the house itself. There is no lift, so every room above the garden floor is up the stairs, and the Duplex adds another flight to bed. There is no parking of its own, only the town's paid public car parks, and spaces in Sóller go quickly in summer. The hotel closes from November to February and asks for three nights from May to September, and the beach is a tram ride away. Book it if you want a small, grown-up house in a working mountain town, with the Tramuntana at the end of the street and a different restaurant every night.