This pilgrim's refuge is not just a hotel. It is gradually being filled with personalities and stories, both real and fictitious. It wants to grow further with your preoccupations and dreams, your emotions, the dialogue between our guests and their experiences. As if it were a stage, in its rooms, lounges, halls and patio we have placed items by way of clues, simply to stimulate your imagination and prowess. So go ahead. Make your opinion heard, contribute, suggest... take part in the hotel's open, creative spirit.
This pilgrims' refuge is not just a hotel, it is your home, a place where your imagination can run free.
Kind sirs, please enter to contemplate and to imagine…
Gar-Anat is like an old, Golden Age Spanish theatre, like those to be found in places like Almagro. Theatre is staging through dialogue of situations and essential problems verbalised in literature; this word, dialogue, along with the building's undeniable similarity with a medieval theatre, gave us the key to its décor and atmosphere: works written by traveller pilgrims who are closely related with Gar-Anat and that are suggested by the staging of each room and the hotel as a whole.
The Puerta Real Collisseum built in 1593, Corral del Carbón, the Cervantes Theatre in Plaza del Campillo, inaugurated in 1810… today Granada has but a few theatres, two of which are just a few minutes' walk from the hotel (Alhambra and Isabel la Católica); nevertheless, its history from the 16th century was full of these old theatres, actors and playwrights who, like Calderón, staged their works in the city. Furthermore, the city with its Alhambra, myth and legend, would give rise to a whole new theatrical genre, "Alhambrismo", grasping the interest of outstanding authors such as Chateaubriand, Lope de Vega, Calderón, José Zorrilla and Francisco Villaespesa. Of Granada's own authors, Mira de Amescua, Martinez de la Rosa, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, José Martín Recuerda, etc. the greatest was surely Federico García Lorca, both for the content and for the new forms of his dramatic works, side by side with his tireless commitment to both promotion (directing the La Barraca touring theatre company) and to the search for essences which, for example, led him to rescue puppet theatre from its low ebb.
We are not going to put a theatre in this hotel, however much we would love to, but we have dressed it like one - you will see as soon as you step over the threshold - and we aim to feel like one, promoting talks and workshops with illustrious (not necessarily meaning famous) local figures who are well worth knowing, proposing stories to our guests that they can interpret for life, and especially helping us to communicate with and understand the preoccupations of our customers…
And all the flowers thought that they were irises...
No one defined Granada better than Soto de Rojas, a paradise closed to many and open to few. This is Gar-Anat... Because furthermore, one of our preoccupations and convictions is the need to return to harmony with nature, an inexhaustible source of inspiration and sensitivity. This is why we have followed in the footsteps of traditional Andalusian patios, filling these areas with pots and plants. Above all we have chosen THE TREE as symbol of the hotel's personality, and we have dubbed it the Tree of Desires.
This Tree of Desires, symbol of Gar-Anat, will be planted on 6 November 2008, and from then on will fill our pilgrims with desires, and replies and messages will return to it too.
