Our Creative Director, Riyad, traveled from Formentera to the Golden Mile. He visited three hotels on two coasts in one week, finding a subtle connection between them. Here are his notes from the journey.
One week, three hotels, two coasts. Teranka in Formentera, then Puente Romano and Marbella Club, sitting right next to each other on Marbella’s Golden Mile. We came home thinking less about the rooms than about the vibe of each place, and how good it felt to keep changing gears.
Formentera has no airport, so you arrive by water or you don’t arrive at all. We took the yacht over from Ibiza and watched the sea turning into a clear blue you don’t quite believe!
Teranka
Formentera
Teranka makes you pause. The name comes from terre d’ancrage, a place to anchor, and the hotel earns it. Built by hand in local stone, 35 rooms across three low buildings named for the sea, the earth and the sky. Mar, Tierra, Cielo. The art on the walls is all by women, much of it made from found materials, weaving and ceramics, the island’s own hands. There’s a Sea Library to disappear into and a sound meditation app loaded in every room if you want it. The whole place is quiet in the best way. Driftwood, natural light, nothing trying too hard. The island does the decorating. The hotel is smart enough to let it.
Our days flowed. Pilates on a deck above the water. Long breakfasts. An open Mehari taken out to a picnic on an empty beach. The next day, the Botanic Sensorial Experience by bike, which we won’t give away beyond saying wear comfortable shoes.
You eat in two places here and you should do both. The Garden sits on the sand under olive trees strung with woven lights, and the kitchen keeps sending out crispy cuttlefish, sea bass tiradito, big sharing plates of rice. Order a Terankini, the house gin with cucumber and aloe, the herbs grown a few steps from your glass. The Rooftop is the other one. Glass on every side, the island below, La Mola lighthouse in the distance. The music rises as the sky goes pink.
One small thing we liked. A donation from every stay goes to protecting the Posidonia, the seagrass that keeps these waters so clear. The place gives back to the thing that makes it.
Then the island lets you go. A short flight to Malaga, and the whole mood changes.
Puente Romano
Marbella
If Teranka is a deep breath, Puente Romano is the night out. Mountains behind, sea in front, and no pretence about wanting to be anything other than the liveliest address on the coast.
Start at the bar, because we did. La Plaza is the heart of the resort, a proper Andalusian square that does lunch in the sun and turns into something else after dark. Right now that something else is Bar La Plaza by SIPS, the Barcelona team voted best bar in the world in 2023 and in the global top three every year since, with a co-founder who once ran the London bar that held the same title four years straight. So the welcome cocktail class on the itinerary turned out to be the SIPS crew themselves, building us Espresso Martinis and Old Fashioneds sweetened with maple.
Dinner after at La Petite Maison, the French Riviera set down on the seafront. Plates keep landing in the middle of the table, you share everything, and the rosé arrives cold and quietly never stops.
The next day started slow, with a long lunch at the Chiringuito with the beach right there, before the part we keep telling people about. First an olfactory class with Amouage. If you don’t know the house, it’s the Omani perfumer founded to be a gift of kings, working with frankincense, rock rose and oud at strengths most brands would never risk. You sit there learning to pull a scent apart, to actually name what you are smelling, and you leave reading the air differently than you did an hour earlier. Later, a wine tasting down in the cellar. The same kind of attention, pointed at a different sense.
Dinner was Coya. Peru filtered through Japan, China and Spain, under a roof that opens to the sky. Loud in the best way, and exactly how a day like that should end.
Marbella Club
Marbella
It’s a ten minute walk from Puente Romano to Marbella Club, three by car, and yet we felt the change the second we came through the gate. One place hums. The other exhales.
The story helps. Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe opened it in 1954, turning his family’s finca into a hotel almost by accident, after too many friends kept turning up to stay. He had a definition of luxury he liked to repeat: privacy and gardens. Seventy years on, the place still runs on exactly that. Ten acres of it, low buildings tucked into the green, villas hidden behind their own walls. It doesn’t feel like a resort. It feels like a private estate that happens to take guests, and it moves at that pace.
We walked the grounds, then settled in for lunch at MC Beach, which the yacht crowd has quietly claimed as its own. In the afternoon we borrowed the hotel bikes and rode into the old town, mostly hunting tapas, which we found without much effort. Jamón, a cold cerveza, orange trees in the square. Then back for drinks at the Summer Bar as the sun went down.
Dinner was The Grill, which is where the place comes alive after dark. Candles that have been lit on that terrace for decades and silver service almost nobody keeps up anymore. The grill master cooks the same recipes his father Roque did before him. Order the cheese soufflé to start and the chocolate mousse to finish, and thank us later.