My first love? A hotel on the Costa Brava. I may have been only seven when my family checked in to Hotel Aigua Blava, but I fell hard. A splodge of whitewashed building shaped like a giant walnut, the hotel careered down to the sea from a curvy coastal road in an alchemical combo of sun-dappled paths, pine-scented air and wave-swish soundtrack.
I spent days in the hotel pool and nights dashing through the gardens with newly made friends. At the bar we signed Shirley Temples to our rooms and they came served like Manhattans, complete with paper doilies and fancy straws. I begged my parents to come back year after year and, for a decade, they willingly obliged.
Everyone comes back — it’s hard not to. I’ve visited a handful of times since and when I return this year with my mum, husband and our own kids in tow, I meet a woman who has not missed her annual fix over the past four decades. There’s comfort in the way the hotel never changes — even some of the waiters remained, albeit with slightly bigger waistlines and slightly less hair. For a long time the area around the hotel was stuck in a time warp too: at Aigua Blava, Sa Tuna, Sa Riera and Tamariu, the impossibly beautiful coves that radiate like rays of sun from the town of Begur, most of the restaurants sported white tablecloths and peeling blue windows and served identical menus of squid, chips and paella.
Oscar Górriz, who set up the pioneering Hostal Sa Rascassa in one of Begur’s tiniest bays, tells me: “When we arrived, my wife and I joked that other restaurants served up rustic, old-fashioned food and paid no attention at all to style or decoration — and still their businesses were booming. But in recent years there has been a bunch of new openings: fusion, Japanese, street food. The choice here is now really wide, better than in most coastal areas of Spain.”
The change is down to a couple of things: sons and daughters inheriting staid hotels and restaurants — and, of course, Covid. “It feels very different now,” says Amanda Kendzior, an estate agent who has lived in the area for six years and runs the Instagram account @onthewildcoast. “There are so many international people, including families, who have moved here full-time since Covid.”
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This cosmopolitan crowd expect more for their money so, beyond the wisteria walls of Hotel Aigua Blava, this wedge of the Costa Brava is becoming cool. And in places it feels positively Balearic. You can sense it in Sa Riera, once the poor relation to the upmarket bays to its south. Now, Palm Beach-style villas slink across the forested hillside and two Ibiza-esque beach-shack restaurants squat on the shore. At the more casual one, La Gandula, staff mill around looking longingly at the sea (who can blame them?). But the one belonging to Hostal Ses Negres — a redone, sorbet-hued hotel along Sa Riera’s gleaming back streets — is a revelation. Seeking shade there one lunchtime, we gobble up ceviche and aubergine with sesame and sheep’s cheese from a menu devised by the Catalan celebrity chef Vicenç Fajardo, while straw lanterns swing above us Maldives-style.
Later we take the coastal path that veers left across the rocks towards the very edge of Begur and the wide sweep of Platja del Raco (it crosses a nudist beach with typical Catalan nonchalance, much to my kids’ amusement). Here, whispers of the resorts to the north announce themselves in banana-yellow apartment complexes, but there’s plenty of room on the shingly swathe for a few more chiringuitos. The best is hip Ultramar, where we’re given rum and Cokes huge enough to match the prolonged pastel dusk.
There’s no sunset on these east-facing beaches, though — for those (huge, tangerine explosions in lilac skies), you need to head inland to Begur town, where Alta House Hotel, one of a new breed of boutique hotels, has a rooftop bar with 360-degree views over the coast and countryside. The town has been fashionable before — in the 19th century it was the place to build a villa if you were a successful merchant returning from Cuba.
The grand mansions that hide in its maze of shaded streets and cobbled squares have more than a hint of Havana about them, especially the opulent, baby-pink-and-raspberry façade of what’s now Hotel Aiguaclara. Inside, however, an interior lovingly curated by ex-Barcelonians Joan and Clara feels surprisingly boho with raffia-framed mirrors, swinging hammocks and signs extolling peace and love.
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Still, the town stubbornly displays as many signs of the old as the new: no-frills tapas bars fringe the main square, and the scruffy courtyard bars of my youth, C-Roack and La Lluna, are going strong a quarter of a century later. A ten-minute drive from town, the fishing village of Tamariu remains a carbon copy of my childhood memories — the mouth of its hazy bay hemmed by jagged white houses huddling like exceptionally pretty teeth.
The next village along, Llafranc, has seen a few more incarnations. Once the party town of choice for Ava Gardner (who came to film on the Costa Brava and fell in love with it too), it was popular with the bucket-and-spade brigade when I was little and now appears to have grown old — all manicured roundabouts and twitching curtains. Look closely, though, and you’ll find traces of another renaissance thanks to the Nomo Group, a posh sushi chain with branches in Barcelona and Madrid. It owns Jani, a radical reinterpretation of all those old beach restaurants, as well as Far Nomo, the place to be seen since 2015.
Inland too things are changing. Kendzior tells me about Grava in the neighbouring town of Pals, a casual courtyard restaurant set up with the area’s surging number of cyclists in mind (they’re everywhere, and we meet the hippest ones zipping along the pedestrian coastal paths accompanied by bandana-wearing dogs). In the sleepy inland village of Regencos, there’s another sure sign of hipsterfication: a street-food joint that doles out much-lauded burgers and tacos. And, when we visit Esclanya, once a slightly ramshackle hamlet, we find converted apartments gleaming in spotless alleys, all clothed in artfully tended cloaks of bougainvillea, and, at the edge of town, the fairylit courtyard of just-opened Alfok, where we settle in for a lazy lunch of pulled-pork enchiladas, homemade nachos and fresh fish.
Back at the hotel my kids do everything I once did: play ping-pong with new friends; paddle in the coves; and sign for lollies by the pool (the Shirley Temples are one thing that’s gone with time). Despite the changes all around, Hotel Aigua Blava has no plans for radical modernisation. “We’re doing up a couple of rooms and we painted the outside in lockdown,” the receptionist tells me. At a place this perfect, anything more would seem like sacrilege. Just as long as you know there’s a new world waiting outside the gates . . .
Amanda Hyde travelled independently. Hotel Aigua Blava has B&B doubles from £104 (hotelaiguablava.com) and Hostal Ses Negres has room-only doubles from £58 (hostalsesnegres.com). Fly to Girona or Barcelona
