€259.50 for 1 Night
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Looking for help choosing or for a property we don't list? Message our Private Rates Concierge on WhatsApp for member rates and insider knowledge on the right stay
Hotel Puntagrande
€259.50/ Night
24/7 Support
Looking for help choosing or for a property we don't list? Message our Private Rates Concierge on WhatsApp for member rates and insider knowledge on the right stay
An adults-only, five-room hotel in an 1830 lava-stone store on a pier at Las Puntas, El Hierro, with the Atlantic on three sides.
Collections:
Free extra on us
Complimentary room upgrade on arrival (subject to availability).
Need To Know
- Five rooms, four doubles of 20 square metres and the Suite Deluxe, with two apartments a few steps away.
- Adults only, 18 and over.
- Our favourite rooms: the Suite Deluxe, for the skylight and the two terraces. Of the doubles, take the Standard with Terrace, or Room 1 for the water beneath it. Choose the apartments for a long stay and a kitchen, and accept that you will be sleeping across the way.
- Breakfast is included. Alma Marina serves dinner by reservation only and closes on Sundays.
- There is no television, and no pool or spa.
- Parking is free in front of the hotel; a car is the way to see the rest of the island.
Check in - Check out
Check in from 15:00; check out before 11:00.
We Love
- The wall of registration plates from old boats, one of them the Ángela Pando's, which went down off La Isleta in Gran Canaria.
- Bedside tables made from ships' portholes, so that the alarm clock sits where a sailor once looked out.
- The glass skylight over the four-poster in the Suite Deluxe, which leaves the island's night sky as the last thing you see.
- The Terrace of Love and the Terrace of the Friends: 40 and 60 square metres, one for the ocean, one for the island, both private.
- Two basins of fossil wood in the Suite Deluxe, a material that took its time, beside a teak shower built for two.
- The walk to La Maceta on a wooden path over black lava, with a natural pool at the end of it.
Key Features
Book Your Stay at Hotel Puntagrande
€259.50 for 1 Night
Location
Address
Lugar Las Puntas, 38911 Frontera, El Hierro, Spain
Travel Info
El Hierro airport is about 22 km away, with flights from Tenerife North and Gran Canaria. Ferries from Los Cristianos in Tenerife take about 2.5 hours, and the port is a 30-minute drive. Parking is free and the hotel can arrange a pick-up.
Expert Review
Origins
The house went up in 1830 on a pier of solidified lava, about 40 square metres of stone in which to keep goods landed from passing ships. A bar-restaurant moved in for good in 1969, and from 1975 the architect José Luis Jiménez Saavedra drew the hotel it became, with the aim of leaving the coast as little altered as he could. Guinness listed it in the 1980s as the smallest hotel in the world, a title that has stayed with it. In 2018 the Canary Islands government declared the building a Bien de Interés Cultural, as an ethnological site.
Top Secret
Room 1 sits directly over the water, close enough to fish from the window. It is sold as one of the doubles and looks like its neighbours in the pictures, so ask for it by number when you book, and bring a line if you mean it.
The Review
The vintage diving suit in the corner is called Arturo, and in Las Puntas they will tell you so. He shares Hotel Puntagrande with the telegraph of the postal barge Viera y Clavijo, the lamps of old fishing boats and a whole wall of registration plates from vessels that no longer float, the Ángela Pando's among them. Portholes do duty as table bases and, in the rooms, as bedside tables. Nearly everything in the building has come ashore, and on a big swell the Atlantic comes up the pier after it.
There are five rooms. Four are doubles of 20 square metres, with lava-stone walls and the ocean in the window; the Standard with Terrace is worth the step up from the plain Standard, since the outdoors is the point of the place. Nobody has put a television in front of the view. The Suite Deluxe is the one to book: 50 square metres with a four-poster under a glass skylight, two walls of lava and two of window, a teak shower built for two and 100 square metres of private terrace, split between the ocean side and the island side. Members book at rates we hold for the Club. The two apartments a few steps away have kitchens and rooftop solariums and suit a longer stay, though from them you look at the hotel from outside it.
Dinner is Alma Marina, by reservation and closed on Sundays, a zero-kilometre tasting menu of fresh fish, local vegetables and artisan cheeses, poured with volcanic wines, in a naval dining room or on the terrace over the ocean. Breakfast comes with the room. Afterwards the Cigar Club has Cuban and Nicaraguan selections and aged rums to go with them.
Cliffs rise straight behind the village, and the whole island, about 10,000 people, is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. A wooden path runs 3 km along the lava to the natural pool of La Maceta, which is where you swim. For the rest you want a car, for the Mirador de la Peña at 700 metres, the lighthouse at Orchilla, the juniper wood of El Sabinar.
It suits couples who read, and anyone for whom an activities programme is a threat. It will not suit children, who are not admitted, or anyone expecting a pool, a spa or a beach of pale sand. Book it for the hour after dinner, when the sea is working at the pier and Arturo, in his corner under the fishing-boat lamps, has the night watch.
