Hotel Villa Itsaso ***

This villa, at present restored as a small hotel, encloses in its architecture and  rural surroundings a very unique period and atmosphere, representative of the Basque historical, social and cultural “future”. It is the first neo-Basque villa, built at the end of the 19th century, in full swing of the  romantic regional Europeanism and in undoubted response to the great  identity crisis overtones brought about by the  1876 foral abolition. Built in 1883 by the geologist Ramón María Adán de Yarza and conceived as a summer house. These were the times when tourism was born, practiced by the English on the coasts of southern France (which we call Iparralde, as it is the north of the Basque Country). Those were the days of the therapeutical  sunbathing  and seabathing; the days of  the spas … and certainly the atmosphere of the bourgeoisie, of industrialization. Obviously, the hotel requires a different comfort from the one conceived in the 19th century, but we aimed to keep the broad open and luminous areas that inspired its original distribution.