A 1914 Movie Palace in Spain Just Reopened as a Hotel — With a Two-Michelin-Star Chef Inside
A century-old former cinema in San Sebastian has reopened as an 81-room Curio Collection hotel with a restaurant from the Mugaritz chef.
A cinema built in 1914 in San Sebastian, on Spain's northern Basque coast, has reopened as a hotel after a full restoration. The 81-room Hotel Palacio Bellas Artes, part of Hilton's Curio Collection, revives a landmark designed by architect Ramon Cortazar, with its ornate dome and facade painstakingly brought back.
The restoration kept the building's cinematic bones and turned them into a design theme, so the movie-palace history runs through the property rather than getting erased. Nightly rates start around $178, or 66,000 Hilton Honors points.
The draw that will get food travelers booking is on the ground floor: a restaurant called Lotu from Andoni Luis Aduriz, the chef behind the two-Michelin-star Mugaritz. San Sebastian already holds one of the densest concentrations of Michelin stars in the world, and adding an Aduriz project inside a hotel gives guests a marquee dining reason to stay put.
The opening deepens Hilton's presence in Spain through its Curio Collection of independent, character-driven hotels, and it lands in a city that punches far above its size for culture and cuisine. San Sebastian pairs the crescent of La Concha beach with a pintxos-bar old town that draws eaters from around the world.
Converting a historic cinema rather than building new also fits a broader hospitality trend: adaptive reuse of landmark buildings, which lets a brand offer a genuinely one-of-a-kind property while preserving a piece of a city's architecture. For San Sebastian, it means a century-old dome that once framed silent films now frames hotel guests instead.
