Ohla Eixample Hotel

As Barcelona’s disappearing sun painted the sky a flamboyant orange, the fibreglass turtle at the end of boutique hotel Ohla Eixample’s rooftop pool stood and watched as I effortlessly swam another lap, hands cutting through the water with barely a splash, as poised as a dolphin that had been to Swiss finishing school. 'What a graceful and elegant swimmer,' thought the fibreglass turtle to himself, wishing he wasn't so rooted to the spot and could dive in too.

'You're in Barcelona, and you know nothing,' said Mrs Smith, breaking my reverie with a passable impression of the late Andrew Sachs, but without the moustache. But she was wrong. Well, we were in Barcelona, but this was a city we knew plenty about. We'd rambled the Ramblas, gawped at Gaudí, mounted Montjuïc and had stopped just short of joining the local beach-volleyball team. So this time, we demanded something new from the beachside city, and our mission base was one of its newest hotels.

We had immediately renamed the Ohla Eixample as the Hola Example. Just as Barcelona is a modernist city – or modernisme as the Catalans have it – then the Ohla is a truly modernist hotel. Almost an artwork, really. The exterior is a grid of neat, vertical lines, punctuated by wooden box-frames. The lobby has gallery-size windows and colourful glass balls dangling like Christmas decorations. Sprawled on one of the many dark sofas, Mrs Smith admired a sculpture of a body in perpetual freefall. Except it wasn’t really a body, but several entwined limbs, elbows and feet jutting out all over the place. A representation of our tangled moral confusion, I wondered, or our grasping search for identity? ‘It’s a bit like you getting dressed in the morning,’ Mrs Smith remarked.    

As the name suggests, Ohla Eixample (pronounced ‘Eye-sham-ple’) is in the Eixample district. But just over the Avinguda Diagonal is the Gràcia district; just off the tourist beat, it’s a good place to measure the city’s pulse, where curious back streets that open out into squares filled with pavement cafés. It’s also a good place to measure out several glasses of bittersweet vermouth. Barcelona’s mixologists are still serving G&Ts in glasses so big that falling into them is a real danger (especially after downing a couple). But the newly resurgent vermouth bars were our MO, and we fell into one at random: the Cadaqués, where we ordered two glasses. Ordering vermut is simple. Go for either de la casa or a classic such as Yzaguirre – red or black, never white – with a dash of soda or without, and usually garnished with an olive and slice of orange. We walked a little further into the Gràcia and found Puigmartí, a brick-walled bar with ceramic donkey heads on the wall, where we were served more vermouth by a barman with a Dalí-esque moustache and a shirt that could cause traffic accidents. If we ever move here, we decided this would be our local.  

Perhaps it was the vermouth’s wormwood, but the next morning I experienced some startling visions. Nightmarish, Punch-like figures with oversized heads, little legs and beak noses dancing around. A group of women dressed in white beating each other with sticks, while a marching band kept time. ‘You’re not dreaming, you idiot,’ said Mrs Smith – turns out we were watching a fiesta outside the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The MACBA gallery is a shiny white wireless speaker of a building, and the artwork inside can be brilliant, baffling and sometimes brilliantly baffling. Our favourite discovery was an enormous wooden barrel, beside which were clear instructions: ‘Take two ice-cubes from the fridge and put them in your mouth. One is sweet and the other salty. Then walk slowly down inside the barrel towards the fan heater at the end’. This sounded like a lot of fun, but sadly the ice-cubes had run out. We tried using chewing-gum instead, but weren’t sure it had the required effect. Then there was a meandering low wall made entirely of painted bread, by the Spanish food artist Miralda, and a series of films and photographs by actionist artists, the actions including blowing a cigarette paper off an upturned hand, and a 20-minute video of a cat lapping milk: a celebration of the unobserved moment.

Of course, some of Spain’s biggest artists can now be found in the kitchen, with more mists, sprays and sous vides than Heston Blumenthal’s boudoir. A friend was once invited to Barcelona to join a conceptual feast hosted by Spanish chefs the Roca Brothers, an epicurean opera in 12 courses that featured edible moon rocks and a wine that tasted of ‘death’. That particular wine was thankfully off the menu at the Ohla Eixample’s restaurant Xerta, but our meal here was plate-droppingly good. Modernist black-and-white dishes arrived with bright food and brighter mouthfuls of Hispanic flavour. A curve of delta eel daubed with miso and black garlic. A pale sea cucumber playing castaway in a lagoon of rich risotto, surrounded by Miró-esque dabs of seaweed mayonnaise. An incredible pudding that deconstructed a piña colada in the shape of an edible bar of soap and a bath sponge. The service was faultless. When Mrs Smith disappeared to the bathroom, her napkin was picked up using tongs and replaced with a fresh one. I watched, fascinated, as for some reason this too was tonged away and replaced. Mrs Smith returned, unaware of the whole unfolding-folded drama. ‘It’s a shame,’ she said, swirling her water glass. ‘We have the ice-cubes here, but no huge wooden barrel to stroll into’.

On our last evening, we headed up to the pool and gazed over the jumbled rooftops, some Ella Fitzgerald drifting from the speakers. There’s nothing like a rooftop pool for giving you that satisfying, urban hit of a penthouse lifestyle. Ahead is the outline of Park Güell, to our left the knobbly coral spires of the Sagrada Família. It’s a new perspective on an old favourite, and we’re happy to have found it.