The Travel Critic

You know when you book a hotel and you’re not entirely sure what you’re getting? That’s how I felt with Hotel 1898 in Barcelona. I’d clicked around their website for a bit, expecting… well, I don’t know what. Something faintly forgettable, perhaps. A boutique business stopover with slightly too much beige? A faded Spanish colonial throwback with more velvet than sense? Whatever it was, I didn’t expect what I got — which was something far, far better.

And that’s sort of the problem. This place is terrible at marketing itself. Really, truly dreadful. The website is all shadows and soft lighting and not enough clue. They’ve got an absolute gem here, and they’ve buried it under a mountain of generic hotel-speak and slow-loading image galleries. Someone needs to take their marketing manager aside, show them a rooftop Negroni, and then gently push them off the edge.

Because Hotel 1898 is, annoyingly, excellent.

Let’s start with the location. La Rambla. Yes, that La Rambla — the grand, tourist-clogged artery that every travel guide tells you to avoid and everyone still ends up walking down. But somehow, perched on its upper end, this hotel manages to be in the action without feeling part of it. You enter through serious doors — dark wood, heavy — into a cool, fragrant lobby that immediately makes you feel like you’ve escaped. It’s a touch colonial, a touch film noir, but without any of the creepy undertones of empire or private members’ clubs. Think less gin and tonic with the viceroy, more first-class Havana lounge before the revolution.

The rooms? Tick, tick, tick. Not enormous, but beautifully judged. There’s that rarest of hotel design achievements — lighting that doesn’t make you look like a corpse. A bed you can lose yourself in. A bathroom you don’t have to fight. Everything works, everything’s in the right place, and nothing feels like it’s trying too hard.

And then you get to the rooftop — and suddenly you’re not in Barcelona, you’re in a Ridley Scott perfume ad. The pool is long and glittering, the skyline spills out in all directions, and the bar is serving gin that doesn’t taste like hand sanitiser. The whole thing is effortlessly, stupidly gorgeous. It’s the kind of place that makes you wish your partner had packed fewer clothes and more swimwear. Or just less of both.

Breakfast is served downstairs in a space that manages to feel grand without being pompous. There are proper eggs, proper coffee, and none of that baffling Catalan ham-and-cake combo that turns up in lesser hotels. The staff are excellent — attentive without hovering, and genuinely helpful in that way that suggests they might actually enjoy their jobs (or at least have been trained within an inch of their lives to pretend they do).

The spa is slick, modern, and smells like eucalyptus and achievement. I didn’t get a treatment, because I don’t believe in being stroked by strangers unless it’s court-ordered, but the pool was serene, the steam room steamy, and the whole thing felt like something you’d expect at twice the price.

Ah yes — the price. Here’s the real kicker. For a hotel of this calibre, in this location, you’d expect to pay the sort of sum that makes your bank manager wince and your partner lie to their parents. But no. Hotel 1898 lands in that rarest of luxury brackets: the “Oh, that’s actually… really reasonable” zone. It feels like a four-and-a-half star experience at a solid three-and-three-quarters-star rate. Which is to say: excellent value, if depressingly hard to write punchy prose about.

Because here’s the rub: this review is boring. And I hate that. I want to tell you about a hilariously awful service moment or a design choice so baffling it haunts your dreams. I want to rant about thermostats that don’t work and minibars that cost more than your flight. But there’s none of that. This place just quietly, confidently gets everything right. No fuss. No pretence. No Instagrammable gimmicks.

Hotel 1898 is that rarest of city-centre beasts: a hotel that feels like home, if your home were designed by someone with actual taste and a hotline to the weather gods. It’s stylish without shouting, comfortable without compromise, and priced like someone made a mistake on the spreadsheet.

So yes, it’s a boring review. But then again, sometimes boring is brilliant.