Hotel España

THE HOTEL IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The owner, Miquel Salvadó, died in 1921 and ownership passed to his nephew, Josep Simón i Salvadó. Riu and Martí ceased to be the managers in 1927 and the businessman, Josep Gaspart, took over running the hotel.

In November 1928, Josep Simón applied for municipal planning permission to build new rooms on the roof of the building in anticipation of the Barcelona International Exhibition of 1929 that would require existing hotels to modernise to accommodate the large influx of foreign visitors and the increasing number of business travellers as Spanish industry began to grow.

In the 1920s, new hotels that were more grandiloquent and magnificent in style with elegant lines and backed by big business with greater resources than old family hotel businesses began to spring up and establish new aesthetic standards based on a different concept of modernity than that of Hotel España, which, in its heyday, in the early twentieth century, had received such plaudits.