We have become astonishingly good at removing friction from travel. Flights are booked in seconds, hotel rooms selected while waiting for coffee, and an alarming proportion of any holiday can now be researched, reviewed, mapped and paid for before one has left the sofa. El Elevador, a remarkable new retreat on the remote Canary Island of El Hierro, has decided that perhaps a little effort might be good for us.
To stay here, you must write a letter. By hand. On paper. Then put it in an envelope, affix a stamp and send it to the island by post, explaining what has drawn you to El Elevador and what you hope to find there. Every letter is read individually and, in due course, a handwritten reply arrives containing a preliminary reservation and a private link through which dates can finally be selected. It is the only digital interaction in the entire booking process. If this sounds wilfully difficult, the address awaiting at the other end rather justifies the trouble.
El Elevador stands alone on the volcanic southern coast of El Hierro, the westernmost of the Canary Islands, with the Atlantic falling away beneath it and little in the immediate vicinity beyond ancient basalt, wind and an uninterrupted horizon. The accommodation comprises a single 60-square-metre open-plan space for two, with six-metre ceilings, changes in floor level, and vast panes of glass, giving the comparatively small footprint an almost monumental scale.
Its origins are considerably more interesting than those of most new hotels. The building began life as a water-pumping station in the 1960s, part of an extraordinary system devised by local miller Juan Casañas to carry fresh water from an otherwise inaccessible spring at sea level up through the cliffs to the fishing village of La Restinga. Casañas had carved a precarious route into the cliff by hand decades earlier, and the rehabilitation of the structure retains both the physical fabric and something of the stubborn ingenuity of its original purpose.
Tenerife-based owners Alberto del Hoyo and Silvia Rodríguez enlisted Canarian architect Alejandro Beautell to undertake the transformation, and his approach is uncompromising. Beautell, whose work includes a number of raw-concrete churches and chapels, has preserved sections of the weathered original blockwork while introducing poured concrete, black-lacquered steel, and precisely framed apertures of light.
The effect is somewhere between a brutalist sanctuary and an extraordinarily sophisticated bunker, the architecture sufficiently disciplined to let the volcanic terrain beyond it do most of the showing off. The former transformer tower has become perhaps the property’s most arresting room: a soaring concrete bathroom in which water falls from an overhead pipe into a chamber roughly six metres high.
Elsewhere, a king bed faces the Atlantic through broad sheets of glass, while a glass-walled projection reaches towards the cliff like the bridge of a ship. Outside, a solid basalt table sits against a view that makes table decoration seem somewhat redundant. The austerity, however, has been very carefully judged. Mauviel cookware, Bassols linen and Josephinenhütte glassware suggest that deprivation is not actually on the programme, while the refrigerator is stocked with bread, coffee, milk, local cheeses, wine and El Hierro’s traditional quesadillas.
There is also a 1930s Remington typewriter with handmade Japanese paper and a vintage Hasselblad loaded with film, which feels either wonderfully romantic or a rather pointed reminder of how recently we became incapable of doing anything without charging it first. What you will not find is Wi-Fi, television or, with any reliability, mobile reception. El Elevador was conceived around silence, solitude and attention, and commits to the idea with admirable severity. Its own manifesto describes the architecture as a means of stripping away distraction so that the territory, material and light can be properly experienced. Sitting on basalt flows more than 15,000 years old, with the ocean in perpetual motion below, one can imagine it making the perfect setting for an A24 film.
There’s no doubt that for some, the idea of this sounds like an elaborate punishment involving expensive concrete. They are not the audience. El Elevador is for those increasingly rare travellers who are prepared to expend some effort in pursuit of somewhere genuinely unusual, and who understand that luxury need not always mean more space, more service or more amenities. Sometimes it simply begins with finding a pen.
For those who are interested in staying, send your letter to the address below.
Att: El Elevador
Apartado de Correos 14
38900 Villa de Valverde
El Hierro, Islas Canarias
España
