Caro Hotel ★★★★★

It’s such fun to discover a surprising hotel, especially when the surprises are all good ones and the background is reliable five-star luxury! The Caro Hotel is architecturally unique. Parts of it are 2000 years old and it has genuine features of a 2nd century Roman mosaic, which was a part of the original 13th century Arabic city walls and Gothic arches. The front that you see as you arrive is from the 19th century. The surprise is how all these elements have come together, not exactly in a restoration to its former state, but by using the ancient bones of the building, treating them with dignity and respect and clothing them in a chic contemporary style to create a luxury, modern five-star hotel.

Each of the rooms is different and there are unobtrusive QR symbols in the rooms and displays around the hotel so that you can link your phone to a page which gives you the relevant history- something we thought that was a clever touch. In our room there was a glass box on the wall which housed old perfume vials that were found during the restoration - it was like having a mini museum in your bedroom. The juxtaposition of ancient and modern is present throughout the hotel, not least in our room where the stone of the ancient walls sits behind the super-modern flat screen TV, in a serene and simple candlelit space. We looked out over the roofs of the town. Even our bathroom had exposed oak beams in the ceiling, showing the bones of the original building, contrasting with a gorgeous circular bath and contemporary design. It came with fluffy bathrobes and slippers, as well as candles, flowers and Bvlgari toiletries for a romantic and dreamy sweet-smelling bathtime atmosphere. Of the modern amenities, we liked the free mini-bar which included nice nibbles, and the thing we can’t live without, even when steeped in history: Wi-Fi.

There is an outdoor heated swimming pool and a bar with a quiet terrace where we enjoyed a pre-dinner drink in the evening sun. In the bar and the restaurant you see ancient stone arches and exposed brick rubbing shoulders with contemporary, chic and ultra-modern furniture, polished marble and glitzy lighting. The menu is Mediterranean, with a plentiful choice of tapas, and we had a lovely evening.

Another surprise we discovered on our jaunt was the old city of Valencia. It wasn’t the tourist-packed undistinguished seaside resort we had feared before we knew better, but a beautiful old city full of culture, grand old Spanish architecture and a cathedral which is said to house the Holy Grail. There are pretty squares and back streets, tempting tapas bars and a breezy palm-lined promenade where the tiling on the ground was reminiscent of the Moorish patterns that you would see further south in Andalucía.

Our first acquaintance with Valencia and our stay in the luxury of the Caro Hotel had been a delightful voyage of discovery!