Zara top (similar)
Zara trousers (similar)
Dior pumps
Celine sunglasses
Vintage necklace (similar)
Celine necklace (similar)
Linjer rings (c/o)
Mejuri earrings (similar)
Location: Palacio Santa Clara – Valencia, Spain
In the early months of lockdown in 2020, when I naively believed it was still possible that a few months spent indoors might allow us to quickly and seamlessly resume normal life, I spent long hours looking at hotels. I still dreamed of the future. And the future I dreamed of, like the present I’d just left behind, was one full of travel adventures. In my searches, I discovered the Palacio Santa Clara in Valencia. It was love at first – click, I suppose.
At the time, the Palacio Santa Clara was a relatively new hotel in an old building – one that dates back to 1916, when Spain maintained its neutrality while much of the rest of Europe was at war. The architect was that the Spanish call a modernist, which is to say that his designs were done in the art nouveau style that was briefly popular in the early twentieth century. The classic glass-domed metro station entrances in Paris are a hallmark of the style, and Tiffany lamps are emblematic of it, too. At the Palacio Santa Clara, the designers leaned in, bringing out the vintage details rather than covering them up to start over. I loved what they’d done with the place.
But I didn’t hold onto the idea that I might get to see it myself for very long. We didn’t leave Manitoba after February in 2020. And we were home for the first ten months of the following year, too. At that point, we booked tickets to Paris in a brief window of time when travel was acceptable, hoping for the best.
It felt like a slow return to normalcy, but in the grand scheme of things, I realise as I write this that it took less than three years for us to get back to travelling the way we always used to. We were in Dublin in January, and Paris in May. We are, once again, spoiled with time and opportunities to see the world, which allowed me to revive my dream of a visit to Valencia.
Once we booked our flights to Madrid, it was as easy as buying train tickets and making a hotel reservation. Of course, nothing about travel is ever truly straight forward – we left the Spanish capital the morning after the second day of pouring rain. The entrance to the train station was flooded. And there are nuances to train travel, like all travel, that differ by country. French and Italian train stations are relatively relaxed places where you can shop, having coffee or read a book while waiting to board. In Spain, you cross through security, much like at an airport, and there is no turning back. You wait with a crowd of travellers until the train pulls in, then walk onto the platform to board.
But once we were on the train, it was like any other holiday within a holiday. I closed my eyes, hoping that by the time I opened them again in Valencia, the skies would be blue. (They were not. But the heaviest grey clouds lifted about twenty minutes before we pulled into the city.) We arrived, after a quick walk from the train station, at the Palacio Santa Clara. It proved to be everything I’d spent the pandemic years dreaming it might be. The rooftop, in particular, offers spectacular views of the city’s unique architecture. (Not to mention a pool with drinks service, which we enjoyed later in the day.)
Maybe it’s silly to write at such length about a hotel, even a beautiful one. But the Palacio Santa Clara was more than just a hotel, for me. It was a hope for the future at a time when the future, even in the next week, was profoundly uncertain. (My concept of uncertainty is, of course, relative and proportionate to my privilege. It is harder to write like this now, while the death toll in Gaza crosses 8000 and calls for ceasefire go ignored.) To stand on this rooftop meant, truly, that we were back; that life was back and that we can start to come up with new dreams.
Sometimes, a hotel isn’t just a hotel. And a rooftop is far more than a rooftop.
We made it to Valencia, at last. It was absolutely worth the wait.
