Seville does not have many Modernist buildings, and its best-known one spent years behind closed doors on Plaza de la Concordia. La Gavidia is open again, this time as Thompson Seville, a 101-room hotel that started checking guests in this week. For anyone who knows the plaza, the building is the headline here. The brand is the footnote.
Hyatt announced the opening on Monday. The building was designed by Ramón Montserrat Ballesté and stands as one of the few examples of Modernist architecture in Seville’s historic center. Carlos Llansó of Exacorp One led the conversion with Mario Ronquillo of Estudio 2RDIP, and the brief was preservation first. La Gavidia kept its architectural character. It just learned hotel hours. This is also Hyatt’s first hotel in Seville, Spain’s fourth-largest city, and the fourth Thompson address in Europe.
Inside, Jorge Lozano and the Proyecto Singular team worked in ochre, copper, earth and carmine. Latticework screens, handcrafted details and native plants run through the patios, and the light and shadow do half the decorating as the day moves. I mean that as a compliment. Most hotel lobbies fight the sun. This one schedules around it.
Art curator Luisa Olazábal’s studio placed contemporary work through the lobby, the corridors and the rooms. The collection follows you upstairs.
Rooms that borrow the city’s light
The 101 rooms and suites are styled as residential retreats, warm wood and natural textures over anything glossy. The ladder runs from city-view rooms and deluxe rooms up to terrace suites, and the one I would book is a terrace room, doors open to the lattice screen and the plaza noise turned down to a murmur.
At the top of the ladder sits the Thompson Suite, private terrace, historic skyline.
The rooms keep the palette of the public spaces, and the residential styling means chairs you can actually sit in that are not the bed. After a full day walking the historic center in Seville heat, a room you can live in for an hour beats a room you can only sleep in.
Small thing. Big difference at 4 p.m. Select rooms lower down the ladder carry private terraces too, so the word terrace in the room name is what separates a good room from the right one.
The gym sits up on the roof, folded into the outdoor spaces, which beats the windowless basement box most city hotels settle for. Dogs and cats are welcome, one per room, up to 8 kilograms, $56 a night, pet liability paperwork at check-in. Big-dog people, that cap leaves your dog home. Plan around it.
The roof gym at sunrise, then. You will have it to yourself.
Casa Mayo, a six o’clock sherry, and the roof after dark
Casa Mayo is the signature restaurant, built with Grupo Manolo Mayo, a family-run Andalusian group cooking since 1963. Hyatt calls gastronomy the heart of this hotel. Architect Pablo Baruc organized the room around a central bar, a wine cellar and an open kitchen, and the terrace sits under a magnolia tree facing the plaza. Start with the tomato salad. It is the group’s signature, and the rice dishes and almadraba bluefin tuna behind it carry sixty years of practice.
Casa Mayo keeps its own street entrance and locals’ hours, open through the day and into the night. In Seville, that decides whether a hotel restaurant lives or becomes a breakfast room with ambitions. That street door changes the crowd. Half the room at lunch will not be sleeping upstairs, and the kitchen cooks like it knows. A dining room full of locals is the only review that counts.
My favorite detail is La Hora. Every day from 6 to 7 p.m., the Lobby Bar pours chilled Jerez sherries with a seasonal bite, one hour, no ceremony. Every hotel should steal this. The bar handles the rest of the day too, specialty coffee and light breakfasts in the morning, tapas and sharing plates later, cocktails built on fino, manzanilla and oloroso sherries and Seville oranges.
Above it all, the Rooftop Bar and Pool flips from a quiet daytime swim to a sunset crowd, spritzes and chilled wines landing as the heat breaks. Salmorejo, croquettes, gildas, shrimp fritters and marinated anchovies run the sharing menu. Go up before the light goes. The jacarandas do the rest.
For groups, the hotel holds 240 square meters of event space, about 2,600 square feet, across four rooms arranged around the interior courtyard. Weddings will find it by spring. So will every brand offsite in the city, and I cannot blame them. The courtyard photographs beautifully, and the sherry is already in the building. Book the courtyard in the morning, before the heat parks itself over the plaza.
Book it if your Seville trip runs on design, food and long evenings, in roughly that order. Plaza de la Concordia puts the historic center on foot, and World of Hyatt members get their program benefits on eligible stays. General manager Olivier Rust says the hotel wants to join the city’s own rhythm, coffee, a table, friends late into the evening. It has the rooms for it.
First Thompson in Andalusia, second in Spain, and the one I would pick of the two. La Gavidia was worth the wait.
