Aire de Bardenas

Aire de Bardenas owes its name to the wind that sweeps across the Navarrese desert, the same wind its architecture shelters from. The hotel was the first building its developers ever put up, and they did so with little time and a tight budget: the project was developed between 2004 and 2006 and construction was completed in 2007. That scarcity of means ended up defining its character, with dry construction, a steel structure and sandwich-panel facades assembled quickly on farmland on the outskirts of Tudela. International recognition came quickly. In 2009 it won first prize at the 10th Spanish Architecture Biennial and the Travel + Leisure Design Award for best small hotel; Monocle named it best designed hotel in 2009 and 2010, and Condé Nast Traveller placed it among the finalists of its Gold List in 2010 and 2011. Over the years the hotel has added new room types, such as the bubbles for sleeping under the open sky, and in 2019 it won the first CaixaBank prize for tourism innovation in Spain.

The Barcelona studio of Emiliano López and Mónica Rivera conceived the hotel as a set of cubic, monochrome volumes laid out on a single level. Instead of one large building, the pieces are scattered so that views pass through the gaps between them and the ensemble does not weigh on a landscape as bare as the Ribera. The structure is steel and the construction system is dry, except for the concrete slabs; the sandwich-panel facades were a response to the limits of time and budget. The most celebrated detail is born of the place itself: the large wooden crates used in the fields of Tudela to carry fruit and vegetables, recycled as windbreaks that protect the patios from the cierzo wind. Of the twenty-two original rooms, thirteen have a private garden. The architects also handled the landscaping, the interiors and the custom furniture. Later came the bubbles, made of PVC with a transparent roof, which open the bedroom to the Navarrese sky.

The hotel stands on the road linking Tudela with Ejea de los Caballeros, at the entrance to the Bardenas Reales Natural Park, a semi-desert of clays, gypsum and sandstone shaped by water and wind and declared a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Its buttes, ravines and plateaus, with silhouettes such as Castildetierra, can be explored by car, by bike or on foot, and the hotel itself runs guided routes by 4x4, van or segway. Ruined medieval towers and the legends of the bandit Sanchicorrota are part of the landscape. A few minutes away lies Tudela, Navarre's second city, with its cathedral and an old quarter that still bears traces of its Muslim, Christian and Jewish past. The Ribera is also one of Spain's great market-garden regions: artichokes, lettuce hearts, asparagus and peppers reach the table each season. Pamplona and Zaragoza airports are around an hour away by car.