Hotel Diana, Tossa de Mar.
Updated: 8 hours ago
Casa Sans · 1906–1910
On the seafront of Tossa de Mar stands a summer house that still holds traces of the people and the decades that shaped it.
Casa Sans was built between 1906 and 1910 for Joan Sans i Moré, a cork merchant who had made his fortune in Colombia. It went up on the site of a ruined fisherman's house.
The architect was Antoni de Falguera i Sivilla, a pupil of Josep Puig i Cadafalch. Its Modernism is in the details: a wavy pediment of green trencadís - broken ceramic - along the roofline, stepped arches over the windows, wrought-iron balconies, stone gargoyles.
In 1930 the Sans family sold the house. The new owner, Fernando Vilallonga i Balam, left his own mark: a sculpture of the goddess Diana by Frederic Marès, and a staircase of Carrara marble.
In 1958 his great-niece, Mercedes Gotarra Blanqué, turned the house into a hotel and named it after the sculpture. Hotel Diana is still a family business.
The house has two faces. The main facade looks west, onto Plaça d'Espanya, and is classical. The facade towards the sea is Modernist, rendered and painted white. The town sees one house; the sea sees another.
Inside, original elements remain: stained glass, cement-tile floors with swans, a fireplace of stone, ceramic and wrought iron. In the fireplace room stand the busts of Joan Sans's daughter and her husband, Francesc Rissech. On the terrace floor, olambrillas: small painted tiles set among terracotta ones.
The century left its marks too. The paintings of women and plants on the original facade were reworked, the roof terrace lost some of its balconies, chimneys and railings, and later additions now hide much of the Modernist house.
Some places are worth noticing not only for what they are, but for everything they have carried with them.
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