Spain's Best Unique and Boutique Hotels

The top-flight hotels in Spain are generally less expensive than their counterparts in other parts of Europe, and Spain has some of the finest luxury hotels on the continent, ranging from 16th-century palaces that still welcome royalty to sleek, ultramodern boutique hotels obsessed with hip design.

But Spain is also loaded with small hotels that are big on character and charm. These hotels usually have a dose of regional flavor: They're often converted mansions, old Arab cármenes (houses with enclosed orchards and gardens), and rustic farmhouses. Many are excellent deals. Expect to pay from 70 to 125 euro ($84–$144) for a double at these smaller accommodations, though some are cheaper still. Below are some of the best:

• Prestige Paseo de Gracia (Barcelona). Surrounded by the city's most upscale shops and quintessential moderniste buildings, this new boutique hotel is a quiet, Zen-like retreat bathed in soothing style. Confident and restrained, it does design as well as any hotel in the city, but never shouts its cutting edge.

• Relais d'Orsà (Barcelona). High on a hill with a bird's-eye view of Barcelona and the sea is this handsome secret of an inn laid out in a palace dating to 1900. Refined and oh so relaxing, it exudes a fresh air that's not really a part of the city, though getting down to Gaudí and the Ramblas is easy enough if you can tear yourself away.

• La Plaça de Madremanya (Baix Empordà). Part fine-dining establishment and part relaxed country hotel, this delightful little place, converted from a 15th-century farmhouse, has an abundance of chic style. Terraces overlook gardens, an architectural pool, and green rolling hills. The restaurant, La Plaça, is among the best north of Barcelona.

• Castell de'Empordà (Baix Empordà). This winning rural inn exhibits a comfort and elegance that belie the fact that it's in a 700-year-old castle. Although rooms in the castle, tower, or more modern annex are all inviting, you'll be drawn outdoors to the handsome pool, gardens, and terrace with serene views of the plains and rolling hills of the Baix Empordà.

• Miróhotel (Bilbao). One of Spain's hippest fashion designers, Antonio Miró, created this chic, modern boutique hotel just down the street from the Guggenheim Museum. The high-tech hotel is like Miró's clothes: clean, cool, artful, and quietly luxurious.

• Posada Mayor de Migueloa (Laguardia). In a tiny, hilltop medieval town in the heart of the Rioja wine region, this charming and friendly family-run inn is a place for wine aficionados and gourmands. Rooms are cozy, the restaurant is first-rate, and the cavernous wine cellars deep beneath the inn have been storing wine since the early 17th century.

• Villa Soro (San Sebastián). An exquisite small hotel in a late-19th-century villa nestled in a residential neighborhood of San Sebastián, Villa Soro combines the services of an upscale hotel with the intimacy (and more accessible prices) of an inn. Quiet and elegant, it's a perfect discreet retreat — and it's just down the street from one of Spain's finest restaurants, Arzak.

• Parador Príncipe de Viana (Olite). This fine parador, or state-owned hotel, has bones no other hotel can match. In Olite, one of the oldest towns in the Navarrese kingdom, just south of Pamplona, it's ensconced within one section of the fairy-tale medieval Palacio Real de Olite, the royal palace and castle topped by cone-shaped turrets.

• Casa de Madrid (Madrid). Bed and breakfasts aren't exactly common in Spain, and although technically a B&B, this swank little place is more like a small 18th-century palace. Perfectly located near an actual palace, the Palacio Real, the seven rooms are superbly decorated with antiques and rich fabrics. A few rooms have kitchenettes, ideal for longer stays.

• Hotel Residencia Rector (Salamanca). This fine small hotel, in a distinguished mansion at the edge of Salamanca's monumental historic district, is an oasis of refined calm. It gets all the details exactly right, and the friendly, unobtrusive service is unequaled in hotels of this size. You'll think you've stepped into a five-star luxury hotel, only the prices are much friendlier.

• Hotel Las Casas de la Judería (Seville). Tucked into a tiny street at the edge of the Santa Cruz neighborhood, this midsize hotel, part of a small chain, nailed an unbeatable formula — stylish inns housed in historic mansions — and begat a wave of imitators across Seville and the rest of Andalusia. In a 17th-century palace that once belonged to the patron of Cervantes, it wears its colorful history with a dose of good cheer.

• Hotel San Gabriel (Ronda). This folksy and family-operated inn aims to be more personal even than most boutique hotels. The friendly owners and their children put their heart and soul into this lovely 1736 mansion, and San Gabriel is as cozy as staying at your favorite aunt's house — if she lived in a beautiful, historical part of charming Ronda. A bargain.

• Hotel Casa Morisca (Granada). This is a romantic and magical place to stay after you've visited the Alhambra, which itself is romantic and magical and then some. This small inn, in a 15th-century villa in the Arab quarter, is similar in style to the nearby, equally atmospheric Palacio de Santa Inés and Carmen de Santa Inés.