Stephen Phelan

LA RED de Paradores, they call it. Or, The Parador Network. In English, it sounds like a fictional guild of assassins. In Spanish too, the keyword is somewhat archaic, drawn out of the deep Castillian past. Parador used to signify humble roadside lodgings for cloaked travellers on horseback in the age of gold doubloons.

Almost a century ago, the name was revived for a new nationwide system of state-owned hotels, intended to provide tourist beds and boost local business in remoter parts of Spain. That ongoing campaign has since added 97 properties in 97 years, from the alpine frontier of the Pyrennes to the wild Atlantic margins of the Canary Islands.

Some Paradors were purpose-built, but most were pre-existing – castles, palaces, forts or convents, often abandoned or ruined before being purchased and repurposed at public expense. Three further aquisitions will round the collection up to 100 before its centenary in 2028 (or 101, if you count the solitary outpost in Portugal). Coming soonest is the first Parador on the Balearic Islands, due to open this year inside the citadel of Dalt Vila, a nested array of Medieval and Renaissance-era defenses above the main port of Ibiza.

That restoration project has taken almost 20 years – intermittently delayed by archaeological due diligence – and cost some €27 million in taxpayer’s money. As a Spanish taxpayer, I am cool with this. Living in this country for the last decade, I have stayed at 23 of these hotels for business or pleasure. I’ve got the stamps to prove it in the Parador Passport issued to every guest who wants one, recording each visit to a new node on the network.

As easily bookable online as any regular hotel, with most of the usual amenities, they also offer a distinguishing richness and strangeness. True, I’ve found certain Paradors a bit sterile behind shell-like refurbished facades. Service can be wonderfully friendly, but I’ve encountered provincial grumpiness too. And the buffet breakfast is pretty generic.

At the same time, Paradors offer specificity as a matter of policy. Their dinner menus are authentic to the region, their stylings generally sensitive to original period designs, and their settings often serve as portals to what they call La España Profunda, or “the deep Spain” – those lonely, uncanny ranges of Iberian countryside that seem conjured from Goya paintings, or passages from Don Quixote.

My favourites include the Parador de Cuenca, which occupies a Gothic-Baroque church and cloister on the brink of an abyssal gorge in Castille-La Mancha. Or the Parador de Corias, which overlooks a forest habitat of wolves and bears in what was once the kingdom of Asturias. Sharing space with a monolithic monastery founded almost 1000 years ago, its modern spa and pool have been fitted between stone vaults and cellars, a vast 11th-century library, and hidden crypts that still house human bones. Hotel director Daniel Gonzalez told me that he sometimes felt like “the guardian of its secrets.”

Depending on season and location, comfortable rooms in such magnificent buildings can cost under $100 a night, and the guest can only guess what would happen to the rack rates if these properties were ever sold off to the private sector. Last week I put this to Raquel Sánchez, the president of Paradores de Turismo de España, and she assured me it was never going to happen. “We’re a proudly public company,” said Sánchez at her Madrid office.

“We believe in making cultural heritage accessible to all, and we can reach places that private initiative can’t.” Some Paradors might return more or less to the treasury in terms of revenue, she admitted, “but our model has proven to be profitable.”

When I suggested that model might seem borderline socialistic to some, Sánchez demurred politely. “I think it’s a matter of squaring a circle, and taking care of what belongs to everyone.” After our conversation, I took my partner and daughter to stay a night at the Parador de Gredos, deep in the mountains of Castilla y León. It was the first hotel on the network in 1928, custom-built from granite and timber in the style of a hunting lodge.

King Alfonso XIII himself chose the site, within a royal game reserve where he liked to shoot the huge-horned native goats. We saw a few live specimens while walking in the woods, then spent a lovely evening lounging by the fireplace, drinking ink-dark Gredos wine, and eating the local speciality, chuletón – T-bone steaks the size of solar panels.

We learned too the military uprising that set off the Spanish Civil War was plotted right here in 1935. For that reason, the country’s present democratic constitution was also drafted at this hotel some 40 years later. On the terrace next morning, I sat reading in the winter sun, exactly where the poet Federico Garcia Lorca was pictured doing the same (before being murdered early in that war). I felt hosted by ghosts, the sensation I love about Paradors.

“In Spain,” wrote Lorca, “the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country.” It occurred to me that a near-century of departed Spanish monarchs, dictators, and civilian leaders, for all their vicious differences, have at least agreed that these hotels remain in the abiding national interest.