The forest cabins that ask you to be quiet

In 2015, Alex López was 25 and working in the treasury department of a bank in Barcelona. That year he was diagnosed with cancer. The illness stripped his priorities back to very little. The job had made sense on paper. It no longer did.

When he recovered, his family gave him money for one thing: a trip away with Maria, whom he had been with since they were sixteen. They tried to book Cabanes als Arbres, the first treehouse hotel in Spain. It was full for almost a year ahead.

Most people would have booked somewhere else. Alex saw a gap. Plenty of people wanted a night in the trees, and almost nobody was building the places for them to have it. He also saw a way of living he wanted for himself.

Maria had spent a year teaching in La Garrotxa, so he knew the area. One day he drove up from Barcelona, through the tunnels, to La Vall de Bianya, walked into the town hall and explained to people he had never met that he wanted to build treehouses. Not rustic ones. Treehouses with hot tubs and proper bathrooms, as comfortable as a good city hotel, in the middle of a forest.

The town hall gave him a single phone number. That site fell through after many meetings. The architect he had met along the way kept looking, and eventually took him to see a large forested estate above the valley. Its owner, Carlos, had bought it in 2015 meaning to open a rural hotel. His son, Alfonso, was about Alex's age.

Alex explained what he had in mind: cabins where couples could get engaged and families could spend real time together. Carlos and Alfonso did not sell him the land. They came in as partners, with the estate and their own resources, on a project that at that point existed only as an idea.

The estate is Mas Espunya: some 200 hectares, most of it forest. People in the valley say it may be among the oldest holdings in La Vall de Bianya. The main house carries a carved date, 1636. The buildings once stood elsewhere on the land, until medieval earthquakes brought them down.

For centuries it worked as a masia in the old Catalan sense: the owner in the main house, the tenant farmers, the masovers, in the buildings around it, paying their rent in crops and labour. Into the 20th century, some fourteen members of one family still lived and farmed there. The last of them had no children. When she was nearly ninety, she sold it.

Alex lived on the estate, alone, for almost two years while it was built. Not in a cabin. In one of the old stone outbuildings, through the winters, with the work going on around him. The masia was rebuilt to hold the reception, the restaurant and shared bathrooms. Paths were cut through forest that had never needed them. Water and electricity were brought to places that had done without both for centuries. Carlos and Alfonso were there with their tractors and excavators, moving the earth.

Asked how he got through it, his answer was simple. When he wants something, he fights until he gets it. Before opening, he did something stranger still for a former banker. He spent two months working in a restaurant with two Michelin stars, to learn what a kitchen at that level demands. He called it brutal. He lost six kilos.

Cabanyes entre Valls opened on 1 November 2019 with two treehouses and two glamping tents. At first it was Alex and Maria alone, doing the cleaning, the cooking, the reception and the check-ins. They worked fifty days without a day off.

In March 2020 the pandemic closed them for two months. Alex used the pause to put the business on a proper footing: a chef, help at reception, a cleaning team. When they reopened, they kept building, a cabin at a time.

There are now ten cabins, two summer tents, a restaurant and fourteen people on the staff. Each cabin is different. Pla del Grèvol has a tree growing up through the inside. The Alpina cabins have mezzanines and wide windows for the stars. El Cirerer was the first Passivhaus built for tourists in Catalonia. Ten may be close to the limit. Alex has said he sees no sense in filling the estate with cabins.

The cabins put comfort first: a proper bed, a proper bathroom, heating, a hot tub on the terrace. Ginebró has a heated outdoor tub and a net to lie on. Pla del Faig has its own heated pool. The tents are simpler and open only in summer.

The restaurant cooks the food of La Garrotxa from local, certified produce, with a little fusion at the edges. The chef, Álex Pujol Puntí, spent twenty years in restaurant kitchens before coming here. "I was a bit saturated by the daily service," he told the Guía Repsol. "Here I can create my dishes calmly."

Breakfast and dinner are brought to the cabin. It was a deliberate choice. Nobody has to cross the forest in the dark, and nobody has to leave the evening they came for.

The estate runs on renewable energy, with 78 solar panels on site. The soaps are natural, single-use plastic is gone, and part of every booking goes to the cancer association in Girona.