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Contemporary hotels in rural Spain Consolacion, Aragón A few years ago, Teruel, the southern province of Aragón, ran a campaign in the Spanish media whose tag-line was 'Teruel existe' ('Teruel exists'). If the province is better known nowadays, the county of Matarraña, where Aragón almost bumps up against the Mediterranean, is still about as far off the beaten track as you can get in Spain. However, a much-improved motorway network is now turning it into a weekend destination for intrepid visitors from Barcelona and Valencia, intrigued to discover that this remote backwater shares something of their culture and history. Barcelona-based business partners Daniel Delgado, Ignacio Mas and Covadonga Folgueras pitched up here in 2003 and were captivated by its unspoilt beauty and bucolic lifestyle. They discovered an old hermitage outside the village of Monroyo and set about thinking what they might do with it. Lovers of modern architecture, they brought in Eugénia Santacana and Estela Camprubí to create the kind of hotel that they and their friends would like to stay in. Consolación consists of two architectural elements. The first is a former hermitage attached to the 17th-century church from which the hotel takes its name. Santacana and Camprubí have given it a fabulously chic interior using fashionable materials - polished concrete, treated metal, plate glass - and furniture from Barcelona's hippest design shops. One of the hotel's 11 suites is in this building; the rest enjoy a more unusual setting. In an ingenious solution to the problem of how to create more rooms in a building that couldn't be substantially altered, cuboid cabins have been built into a rocky hillside some distance from the main hotel, so there is a faint sense of a super-luxury campsite as you pick your way towards them after dinner. (The hotel restaurant, under chef Gonzalo Benavides, is a cut above anything else in the area.)
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