Отель Онабрава в Санта-Сусанне. Коста дель Маресме. Hotel Onabrava in Santa Susanna. Costa del Maresme.

We stayed at the hotel in August 2009. in two weeks. The town of Santa Susanna, where the hotel is located, is small, cozy and smoothly and continuously passes into another resort town of Malgrat de Mar, much larger in size. These towns are connected by one long and busy promenade in the evenings, on which there are a lot of hotels, restaurants, bars, resort-type shops (with towels, slippers, umbrellas, souvenirs, etc. ) and several shops with elite leather accessories and ladies' gizmos like scarves, handkerchiefs... and also clothes. Significantly more shops in Malgrat de Mar. Moreover, there they are inexpensive with good quality goods. On Saturdays, the promenade is closed in Santa Susanna and an outdoor fair is held, where goods are sold at a cost of 2-3 euros. The sight is very sweet and curious. Car pleasure trains drive along the promenade, on which you can ride both Santa Susanna and Malgrat de Mar: their final stops are in Santa Susanna nearby (50 meters from each other). It is very interesting to drive, especially along Santa Susanna. This city itself is located on fairly high hills a little away from the resort area with a promenade, and the views both on the hills themselves with neat mansions and on the city from these hills are very interesting. Malgrat de Mar, on the other hand, is interesting for its old narrow streets, along which a steam locomotive passes with difficulty, from which, it seems, you can reach the walls of the houses with your hands.
Hotel "Onabrava" is located very conveniently - at the beginning of the promenade, so in order to get around the promenade, you do not have to go back and forth, but just go out and go in one direction. The hotel is brand new with all the ensuing consequences: new furniture, complete and well-functioning plumbing, etc. Room keys are magnetic. The air conditioner in the room is central but powerful and works well. It turns on with the same card that opens the door. At the entrance, on the right side, a card receiver is fixed on the wall into which it must be inserted until a tangible, as it were, snap of the capture. The air conditioner automatically turns off when you open the balcony. To be able to leave the air conditioner on in your absence, you must ask the reception for a second room key and use it for the air conditioner. The room is not very big, but it is not needed. The bed is excellent: double and very spacious, almost three-sleeping. The balcony is good with balcony furniture: a couple of chairs and a table. In the same place, on the chairs, they usually dried and washed. The room has a safe deposit box, which is taken by the key. When you check out, you hand over the key and you get the deposit back.
The windows of the rooms of all, except for the suites, overlook each other and neighboring hotels. But in Santa Susanna, almost 95% of the hotels are like this, because all of them, with rare exceptions, are on the same street side by side.

The hotel "Onabrava" has two "wings", interconnected by a spacious hall with a reception, a bar, a lounge with a piano and a pianist, sofas and armchairs. The restaurant is located in our "ground floor", ie. half below the ground, but done so ingeniously that there are full-length display windows overlooking the pool and pool bar. The food is very varied and good. Breakfast is full, i. e. there are also a lot of cold appetizers (all sorts of cuts, cheese, jamon, sausages, ham, salads, yogurt, milk, muesli, fruits... ), as well as hot dishes such as scrambled eggs, sausages, fish, meat. From drinks - tea, coffee, juices from the machine, champagne. Fruits were usually pineapples, watermelons, melons, plums, peaches and fruit salads. Fruits are not always the most ripe, especially peaches and plums, had to be chosen. But always everything that was on the distribution was replenished in a timely manner and there was no shortage of something.
We had HB so I can only speak about dinner. For dinner, the choice is much larger: wonderful baked meat, which is cut right in front of you and for you, no less than three types of fish, various meat dishes, sushi, ice cream. drinks for dinner are all (! ) Paid. Wine cards are served on the tables, you can take wine, water, beer, etc. for money. That is, the hotel restaurant works for drinks in real restaurant mode. Since we are not connoisseurs of Spanish wines, when we ordered, we described what kind of wine we want, for example: dry red. Thanks to the waiters, they were professionals and that's what they brought, and inexpensively: 500 ml of wine cost about 4-5 euros. In general, the hotel staff has a very good school and a high level of discipline. This is not a family-type hotel, but a mass one, and therefore it is precisely such staff that is needed there. Everyone is polite, cold-blooded, attentive, but there are a lot of vacationers and therefore you will be given just enough time to solve your problem and that's it.
If you exit from the back of the hotel and pass the parking lot across the field, then 300 meters to the right there are hangar-type buildings - these are shops, incl. supermarket, where we gladly took Sangria for 2.5 euros per liter bottle. Among these stores there is a wine supermarket - in Spain there are such. On sale there are hundreds of varieties and types of wines and other alcoholic beverages, as well as accompanying products such as sweets, jamon, etc. There are also a dozen small kegs with taps and plastic cups for tasting: everything in kegs is free try. True, we did this only when the guides brought us along the way to such wine markets (herd and dad is easier to beat).
The beaches are 300-400m from the hotel, but you don't feel these meters. The beaches are democratic. Negroes in the morning put out shabby deck chairs, on which 1.5 percent of vacationers settle down for money. We, like everyone else, bought a large towel for 8 euros and calmly settled on it. Anyone who wants to can buy an umbrella for the same money. And then leave it or take it home with you, as you wish.

The road to the beach passes under the railway bed. The train along the Costa del Maresme runs along the entire coast and separates the beach from almost all hotels. But the train seems to be on rubber wheels, so you can't hear it in the rooms. The train stop in Santa Susanna is a 3-minute walk from the Onabrava hotel. Terribly comfortable. The road to Barcelona takes about 1 hour 15 minutes. At the same time, you arrive right in the city center on Plaza Catalunya. This train is an electric train and therefore the ticket can be used at any time during the day. It is better to take a ticket back and forth, it is cheaper, and if in Barcelona you want to travel by a tourist bus with a sightseeing tour, it is cheaper to take a bus ticket at the railway ticket office in Santa Susanna along with a train ticket. In this case, a train ticket will cost almost half as much. Just ask for a ticket for Bus turistic and Barcelona & back.
And the last thing: the contingent of vacationers in Santa Susanna consists mainly of adult family people with children and the elderly. Everything is calm and quite respectable there. The beach can be called both small pebble and coarse sand, some kind of soil structure with quartz particles 1-5 mm in size. The municipal beach is of moderate cleanliness, it is cleaned mechanically (by machines with screening devices) daily. The sea is very clean and transparent. Passenger boats sail on the sea. On them you can sail to the neighboring resort towns.
Have a good rest.