Eurostars Palacio de Cristal – Oviedo, Spain
A Santiago Calatrava landmark where monumental white architecture turns an overnight stay into an encounter with contemporary design.
Why DNA Hotels Loves It
● The hotel occupies part of the spectacular Palacio de Exposiciones y Congresos Ciudad de Oviedo, designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.
● Calatrava’s unmistakable language of sweeping white forms, glass, symmetry and enormous open volumes makes the building unlike almost anything else in Spanish hospitality.
● An intriguing architectural counterpoint to historic Oviedo: stay in something unapologetically 21st-century, then walk into a city of medieval streets, Asturian cider houses and pre-Romanesque heritage.
Sleeping Inside a Calatrava
Some hotels commission an architect to create a beautiful building. Eurostars Palacio de Cristal happens to occupy part of an architectural spectacle. Designed by Santiago Calatrava, the vast complex rises above Oviedo in an explosion of white concrete, steel and glass. Curving structural elements stretch outward like wings, enormous glazed surfaces pull daylight deep into the building and the whole composition seems caught somewhere between a skeleton, a spacecraft and a piece of monumental sculpture. Subtle it isn’t. But that is precisely why it belongs on DNA Hotels.
Architecture in Motion
Calatrava has spent much of his career making stationary buildings appear as though they might move. Oviedo is a particularly dramatic example. The Palacio de Exposiciones y Congresos was conceived as a multifunctional complex incorporating conference and exhibition facilities alongside commercial spaces and the hotel. Its huge white structural ribs, elliptical forms and soaring interior volumes display the architect’s fascination with anatomy, engineering and movement. From certain angles, the building appears almost weightless. From others, its sheer scale becomes apparent. It is architecture designed to be experienced spatially rather than merely photographed — and staying here means repeatedly moving through those changing perspectives instead of simply visiting them.
Calm Inside the Sculpture
The guestrooms wisely don’t attempt to compete. Where the architecture outside is expressive, the rooms are comparatively restrained: timber floors, neutral colours, simple contemporary furniture and generous expanses of glass. That contrast works. Large windows bring daylight into the rooms and open views towards Oviedo and the green Asturian landscape beyond, while uncluttered interiors provide some visual relief from the structural drama elsewhere in the complex. Here, space and light become the decoration. The result is closer to contemporary architectural minimalism than conventional Spanish grand-hotel luxury.
Oviedo: The Unexpected Counterpoint
The location also creates an interesting way to experience the Asturian capital. Walk towards central Oviedo and Calatrava’s futuristic world gradually gives way to an altogether older city: elegant squares, historic façades, pedestrian streets and the medieval heart surrounding the cathedral. Beyond that lies an even older architectural story. Oviedo is renowned for its extraordinary pre-Romanesque Asturian monuments, including Santa María del Naranco and San Miguel de Lillo — buildings dating from the ninth century that form part of the city’s UNESCO-listed heritage. Few hotel stays offer quite such an architectural leap: from the early Middle Ages to Santiago Calatrava in the course of a morning.
Then There Is Asturias
Architecture may provide the reason DNA Hotels noticed the hotel, but food provides another reason to explore beyond it. Oviedo is an excellent introduction to Asturian gastronomy: cider poured dramatically from above the head, powerful regional cheeses such as Cabrales, fabada asturiana, seafood from the nearby Cantabrian coast and traditional restaurants where restraint isn’t necessarily part of the vocabulary. The surrounding landscape provides another contrast to the crystalline whiteness of the hotel. Asturias is intensely green, mountainous and Atlantic, with the Cantabrian Mountains rising behind the city and the coast within easy reach.
Why It Works
Eurostars Palacio de Cristal isn’t an intimate boutique hotel, nor does it need to pretend to be one. The reason to stay is the building. Hotels occupying genuinely significant contemporary architecture remain surprisingly rare, and here the architecture fundamentally changes the experience of arriving, moving through the property and looking back at it from the city. You don’t come to Eurostars Palacio de Cristal for decorative hotel design. You come to sleep inside a Santiago Calatrava — a monumental, occasionally audacious and unmistakably original piece of 21st-century Oviedo.
