The decision to build a new hotel on the site of the Monastery of Sant Benet de Bages was the result of a long project. From the moment Caixa Manresa acquired ownership of the legendary Romanesque monument, the economic, technical and creative springs were set in motion to assemble a complex and suggestive idea to revitalise not only the surroundings of Sant Benet, but also a large part of the Bages region.
Caixa Manresa has facilitated the transfer of an old Benedictine monastery of medieval origin to an emblematic complex of as yet unplanned scope, a project called Món Sant Benet.
Around the monastery, which has been restored and extended for museum and congress centre uses, there is a new building for a reception centre and banqueting space, a specific centre for research in the field of food, the Alícia Foundation, and, finally, a four-star hotel located around the complex that acts as a physical and visual boundary on the edge of the buildings.
The Món hotel is conceived as one more piece in the building fabric, keeping its own shapes and using materials, colours and textures in harmony with those of the other existing buildings.
The project is articulated around an enclosed garden, with the church bell tower as a reference element and visual guide for the complex. The 89 rooms offer views exclusively towards this space, through covered terraces protected by aluminium shutters. Thus, a single-bay hotel is conceived where all the rooms face the good orientation, while the access corridor serves and surrounds them on the opposite side. The form of the building responds to this premise: an open, glazed and active appearance towards the south, and closed façades with occasional and strategic perforations towards the north.
The building complex described above is developed on three levels, on which the rooms are distributed. Only the central level, which serves as access to the clients, has large areas for public use. This is where the reception, lounges, cafeteria, bar and restaurant are located, all of which open onto a large outdoor platform facing the monastery.
The almost indefinite alignment of the rooms is interrupted by the broken form of the powerful volumetry, which generates bodies that open or fit together according to the needs and uses of the articulation nodes.
The three floors of the hotel are crowned by a metallic roof that runs along a good part of the perimeter, facilitating the installation of extractors, fireplaces, etc., inside to prevent their visual presence from the outside.
The broken alignment of the hotel has two exceptions: the fissure that occurs in the canal area, where a glazed body has been designed to serve as a gastronomic dining room, and the playful esplanade around the open-air swimming pool situated on the south-western limit of the site.
The austerity of the architectural language was one of the objectives pursued. The limited use of materials, the grey, green and even black tones chosen and the predominance of natural stone in contact with the exposed concrete give the hotel an almost monastic appearance; appropriate, in our opinion, to the historic monument.
The initial arguments of adaptation to the territory, orientation towards the monastery, solid and austere image, and integration into the landscape have been effectively fulfilled. All that remains now is to get the complex up and running and adapt its use to the sometimes strict architectural requirements.
