Les Cols Pavellons

Les Cols is the Puigdevall family farmhouse, a centuries-old country house on the outskirts of Olot. In 1990 Fina Puigdevall opened a restaurant there that over the years would become a benchmark of Catalan cooking rooted in its territory, built on Garrotxa produce and on the idea of food that has not travelled. To transform the farmhouse, the family turned to RCR Arquitectes, the studio Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta had founded in their home town. The remodelling of the dining room, with steel and glass inserted into the old structure, was the prelude to the pavilions, designed between 2002 and 2005 so that diners could extend the experience and stay the night. The restaurant earned its second Michelin star in 2010 and is now run by Fina together with her daughters Clara, Martina and Carlota Puigvert. In 2017 RCR received the Pritzker Prize, turning Les Cols into a place of pilgrimage for architecture lovers. The restaurant and the pavilions are managed independently.

The five pavilions stand beside a stone wall on the estate, and their layout takes its cue from the structures of the surrounding vegetable gardens. An enclosure of green steel rods wraps the complex and doubles as a fence. Inside, a wall of glass in the same colour zigzags to create bands of different widths: the narrow ones hold the corridors and the wide ones the rooms. Walls, floors and ceilings are transparent or reflective, and the only piece of furniture is a green mattress cut into strips. The bathrooms have no conventional sinks, only surfaces over which water flows, and the bathtubs are filled with stones that evoke the streams of the Garrotxa. RCR's intention was to dissolve the feeling of enclosure through light, colour, transparency and reflection, so that nature, real or abstract, enters the space. It is a key piece for understanding the Olot studio's architecture.

Olot is the capital of the Garrotxa and is surrounded by the Garrotxa Volcanic Zone Natural Park, the finest volcanic landscape on the Iberian Peninsula, with dozens of cones and lava flows covered in forest. From the pavilions it takes only a few minutes to reach the Croscat volcano or Santa Margarida, with its hermitage at the bottom of the crater, and the Fageda d'en Jordà, a beech forest growing on an ancient lava flow. Close by are Castellfollit de la Roca, perched on a basalt cliff, and Besalú, with its fortified medieval bridge. Olot itself is an open-air museum of RCR's work, and the hotel offers a guided route through their buildings in the area. The volcanic cuisine of the Garrotxa — Olot potatoes, Santa Pau beans, buckwheat — completes the trip. The hotel also arranges dawn balloon flights over the volcanoes.