Concepció by Nobis

The old floor tiles found at Concepció by Nobis were badly damaged, and had probably been made in Campos, east of Palma, so the Swedish architects Wingårdhs went to the factory there. The new ones are handmade cement, nearly a metre wide, in a pattern of 36 squares taken from an anonymous watercolour found online, and in the green of the broken originals: a building of 1576, floored in the end from the internet. In its time it has been a soap factory, then shops and restaurants with flats above, and the hotel has restored the sandstone vault on the ground floor and added a reception desk in polished brass. Upstairs each of the 31 rooms has a layout of its own, under dark beams. The pool is roughly triangular, because archaeology turned up exactly where it was meant to go, and lies in a courtyard of old rubble-stone walls, with striped cushions in the shade of a pergola.

Recommended for couples who want Palma's old town on foot and a pool to come back to, and for parents with a baby, since babysitting can be arranged and the kitchen will adapt a dish. The hotel stands where the old town meets Santa Catalina, whose market is the city's oldest, and the cathedral is under ten minutes' walk; there is no parking, which settles how to get about. Until seven the pool is for hotel guests only, and after that the terrace opens to everyone for cocktails and dinner. At Xalest, Xema Álvarez cooks Mallorcan produce for sharing: red-prawn croquettes, beef cheek with truffled potato purée. Its bar, in silvery hammered zinc, faces the street and pours until half past eleven.