Hotel Rural Can Vila

The Hotel Rural Can Vila occupies an early 19th-century farmhouse at kilometre 7.5 of the Montseny road, in Sant Esteve de Palautordera, at the foot of the natural park. It was restored with its original materials, stone, wood and iron, and shares an estate with the Can Vila riding club: from many windows you see the forest and the riding arenas. It is a small hotel, with nine rooms, with the riding centre and the tracks of the lower Montseny on the doorstep.

Nine rooms named after plants

Each room is named after a plant or a place in the massif. Six face outwards: Farigola, Espígol, Malva and Romaní, standard doubles, and Lledoner and Alzina, special doubles. The other three are interior: Montseny, a standard double; the Sant Elies junior suite, and the Matagalls family suite. The interior ones are reached by lift.

All have a king-size bed, television, internet connection, safe, minibar, air conditioning and heating. The hotel has parking, a reading room and a meeting room for twelve people, and can call you a taxi. The website does not publish room prices or check-in and check-out times: the booking engine gives them.

Breakfast at €10 and cancellation in stages

Breakfast is not included: it costs €10 per person. An extra bed is €35, and room prices are given without VAT. If you cancel more than 30 days ahead you pay nothing; between 30 and 15 days you lose 40% of the deposit, between 15 and 7 days 60%, and with seven days or less, all of it.

With a dog and with horses

The hotel accepts pets for €20 a night. Next door leave the Can Vila horse rides, which the hotel advertises at €28 an hour and which cross the River Tordera; they also hire bicycles with prior booking. The restaurant, in a glazed annexe facing the arena, opens at weekends for guests, with Catalan seasonal cooking and compulsory booking; on weekdays you will have to dine out.

Montclús castle, fourteen minutes on foot

On foot, in about fourteen minutes, you reach Montclús castle, which locally is also called the Moors' castle. By car, the valley of Santa Fe is about half an hour away and Collformic, the start of the climb to Matagalls, about 40 minutes. Up the road, towards the village of Montseny, the farmhouse Can Barrina has a restaurant with holm-oak grill and a terrace over the Tordera valley, and in the village square La Fonda del Montseny serves meals Wednesday to Sunday.