Marques de Riscal - Wine, Spa & Frank Gehry’s Spaceship Hotel in Rioja
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In the vineyards of Rioja, something very like a spacecraft has appeared on the horizon. Its occupants are not aliens but sophisticated tourists, and as such the locals regard their mothership as an icon heralding their salvation.
For this is no ordinary jumble of red, gold and silver titanium hoisted on stilts over the tiny Renaissance village of Elciego. It’s the first hotel by the architect Frank Gehry, who designed the Guggenheim at Bilbao which it so closely resembles.
The architectural similarity is the whole point of the £60 million undertaking by winemakers Marques de Riscal. The Bilbao effect is a legend among Spanish entrepreneurs, who are still reeling at how a single building managed to transform an industrial seaport into a top-flight tourist destination. Of course, the Guggenheim was only the tip of the iceberg; it was followed by a wholesale redesign of the waterfront, with designer hotels and restaurants springing up in its wake.
So things are going in Rioja, a lovely piece of wine country which totally underestimated its potential as a tourist destination. While French and American vineyards opened visitor centres and gastropubs, the vaults remained firmly closed in Spain, and wine sales suffered.
Then Ysios, one of the more avant-garde wineries, commissioned Spain’s greatest architect, Calatrava, to design the country’s first cutting-edge bodega. It sits across the hill from Marques de Riscal, whose owners decided to go one better and build the region’s first five-star hotel and spa and throw open their vaults to visitors for the first time in their 150-year history.
They schmoozed Gehry at a Guggenheim reception in Bilbao, begged him to come and visit the vineyards and cracked open a bottle from the septuagenarian’s birth year when he accepted the invitation. The architect was hooked, and the result is an audacious experiment which will delight lovers of wine and architecture, and provide a reason to home in on this rewarding and under-travelled corner of Spain.
The hotel itself, operated by Starwood’s Luxury Collection, offers both the craziness of Gehry architecture - wavily-sculpted leather headboards and curiously-angled windows - in the original block, and conventional understated elegance in an annexe reached by a spectacular glass walkway. Below the main block sits the winery, while underneath the annexe lies Spain’s first Caudalie spa, offering “vinotherapie” in delightfully Zen-inspired surroundings.
A “gastronomic” restaurant within the hotel is still finding its way, but there is excellent eating to be had within the city walls of neighbouring Laguardia, another picturesque and historic little hill town to which visits with wine and architecture experts can be arranged by the hotel. Really good food, the best in the country, is a characteristic of the whole of “Pais Vasco”, the Basque country of northeast Spain.
A visit to Marques de Riscal works well as part of either a cultural combo wth Bilbao (the Guggenheim alone is worth the visit) or a triangular gastronomic tour incorporating San Sebastian, the food capital of Spain and an elegant resort.
Gastronomy and culture diverge beautifully at Dinastia Vivanco, not far from Elciego and probably the world’s finest wine museum. Far more than a collection of machinery, glassware and ancient fragments documenting two millennia of wine consumption in the region, it also offers wine courses and a decent restaurant. Lunch and a tour here followed by a massage with grape-seed extracts and a night in Spain’s hottest new hotel makes for a sybaritic experience at the cutting edge for which Gehry’s spaceship is a fitting symbol.
Calle Torrea 1, Elciego, Spain
Contact tel: +(34) 945 180880
Cost standard double room: £200 - £500 per night
Services spa, swimming pool, fitness equipment, parking, hotel restaurant, hotel bar, room service, business services, internet access
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