Thick walls, and the sense to sit still
The Baix Empordà is Catalonia with the volume turned down. Between Pals and Begur the land folds into low hills, the Gavarres behind, medieval villages kept more or less to themselves, and the sea near enough to reach in twenty minutes but out of sight and out of mind. Mas de Torrent sits in the middle of that quiet, a masía whose main house dates from 1751, its stone walls thick, its rooms cool and low, bougainvillea thrown across the facade through the summer. It became a hotel decades ago, one of the first serious ones on this coast, and it is now the flagship of the small Catalan group Único, which reopened it after a long restoration.
The old house holds the heart of the place, its vaulted salons and the Masía Suites full of original detail. Around it, single-storey suites in the local vernacular open onto the garden, terracotta underfoot, the cypresses standing guard. There are thirty-nine rooms and suites in all, which is part of the point, and the register the place plays in is quieter than its badges suggest. Relais & Châteaux keeps it on the list; in 2024 it became the first hotel on the Costa Brava to be given two Michelin Keys, and it held them again the following year. None of that is the reason you would remember it.
What the Empordà grows
El Mas is the kitchen that matters, reading this corner of Catalonia through its own produce, the vegetables and the fish and the slow local cooking the Empordà has always done well. The region is one of the country's oldest wine districts, and the cellar makes a point of it, so you tend to drink the place before you have left the garden. It is careful food that does not draw attention to being careful, which is harder than it looks and rarer than it should be.
In summer a second table takes over the garden. Las Brasas del Mas works the grill in the open air, looser and built for the long lunches the season asks for, and it is the version of the hotel most people will remember: a shaded terrace, something over coals, an afternoon that goes nowhere. The old house keeps its cooler rooms in reserve for the evening, the vaults and the arches doing the work no dining room designed this decade could fake.
A farmhouse that has learned to recede around you, and a garden you raise the shutters onto.
Left alone with the garden
The rooms are done in warm, muted colours, linen and terracotta and dark wood, the light let in and then left to do as it pleases. Take one in the old house for the vaults and the weight of the stone, or a garden suite for the terrace and the way the morning arrives across it. Either way the day organises itself around very little: the pool and the gardens, the Mas Spa, which runs to more than six hundred square metres when you want it and stays out of sight when you don't.
When the coast finally calls, the hotel will put you on its own boat and run you out to the coves of the Costa Brava, the pine-backed calas that made this stretch famous, and bring you back for dinner. Pals and Peratallada and Begur are a few minutes each; the wine country is on the doorstep. It will not suit anyone who needs the sea from their window or a crowd around them. Give it the days it asks for, and it is hard to think of better company for a slow week inland.
Mas de Torrent is a farmhouse that has learned to recede around you, and it is the better for it. We have not yet stayed, so this stands as a researched profile rather than a first-hand verdict. On the evidence of the kitchen, the garden and the boat waiting for the coast, it reads as one of the surer things inland from this coast.
VANE note. This is a researched profile, not yet a first-hand VANE verdict. A full review carries a stay date, an independence disclosure and the writer's own account. Photos: Mas de Torrent (official), with credit.
