Lasala Plaza Hotel

La Jarana was the old name of San Sebastián's port quarter, and Lasala Plaza has given it to the pintxos restaurant on its ground floor, La Jarana Taberna, a minute from the old fishing port. The building went up in 1917 on the square where the Parte Vieja meets the harbour: six floors of honey-coloured stone, with carved scallop shells along the parapet and wrought-iron rails at the tall windows. When it became a hotel of 58 rooms in 2018, Luisa López Tellería brought the port into the interiors as well: bedside tables modelled on sardine tins, and oil paintings worked from the fractal patterns of salt. The rooms to ask for are named for their view, Vista Puerto and Vista Mar, or there is the Suite La Concha, with black-and-white prints of the harbour on the wall and the bay in the window.

Recommended for grown-ups who have come to San Sebastián to eat: the hotel takes nobody under eighteen, and the pintxos bars of Calle Mayor start 80 metres from the door. Breakfast is à la carte in the Lobby Bar, there are e-bikes to hire, and with no spa in the building the hotel books massages nearby. Guests praise the rooms, finished down to the bathroom fittings, and the roof, open to the public too, where they recommend watching the fireworks over the bay in festival weeks. Its view runs all the way round, over the port, the old town's roofs and La Concha bay, and in summer there is a small, narrow dipping pool. The hotel calls it a water area for cooling off, which is modest and accurate: anyone after lengths has the bay, five minutes' walk away.