This Galician spa resort has already featured in the plots of Nieves Herrero’s ‘What Their Eyes Concealed’ and Teresa Viejo’s ‘Memory of Water’.
The Mondariz Spa returns to the Belle Époque through the eyes of the writer Laura Portas and her new novel *El Palacio del Agua*. A story set in the Galician spa town that recounts the experiences, discoveries and feelings of Candela.
Even for those who have never visited it, it is not difficult to associate the name of the Mondariz Spa with one of the great jewels of thermal tourism in Spain. What is perhaps less well known is the fascinating history (and stories) contained within its walls. Since its opening in the late 19th century, this place soon became a holiday destination for the country’s aristocratic, political and intellectual elite; Emilia Pardo Bazán, Isabel de Borbón ‘La Chata’, the Nobel Prize winner José Echegaray… are just some of the personalities who were seen there in the early years of the 20th century.
It is precisely this golden age in which Laura Portas sets the plot of her novel, starring a servant of humble origins who, in 1920, begins working at the Gran Hotel del Balneario, where she rubs shoulders with the most illustrious and powerful elite of a country facing turbulent times. But luxury and appearances conceal a world of deceit, forbidden passions and betrayals. Candela must navigate her relationship with Ignacio, her first love, who has returned to her life without warning, and Gabriel, one of the hotel employees, who has asked her to marry him.
Things take a turn for the worse when Candela finds herself caught up in a dangerous criminal plot as turbulent as the waters that surround her. To uncover the secret hidden within the spa, the young woman must confront the shadows of her past and the intrigues that lie in wait for her, and she will discover that the truth burns hotter than lies. But who will end up reduced to ashes?
Today, more than 150 years later, the current spa resort is no less bustling, modern and innovative as a tourist destination.
Laura Portas, born in Cambados in 1992, holds a degree in Journalism from the Complutense University of Madrid. She also has a Master’s degree in Television Journalism from Nebrija University and another in Corporate Communication from the European Business School of Barcelona. Her professional career has been primarily linked to the media. She has worked as a reporter for Informativos Telecinco and other programmes on the channel, as well as for Antena 3 Noticias. Following the success of her first novel, “El baile de las mareas” (Plaza & Janés, 2024), she is now setting out to explore another part of Galicia with “El Palacio del Agua”.
Balneario de Mondariz, the setting for novels
Nieves Herrero also captured the social atmosphere of Mondariz Spa in her novel *Lo que escondías sus ojos* (What Her Eyes Concealed), in which the protagonist, the Marquise of Llanzol, spends a short spell at the spa to rest. The book tells the story of the great forbidden love of the Franco era: a historical fiction about the hidden passion between Sonsoles de Icaza, wife of the Marquis of Llanzol and muse of the fashion designer Balenciaga, and Ramón Serrano Súñer, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Franco’s “very close brother-in-law”.
In a devastated country and an atmosphere of false neutrality, with the Second World War as a backdrop, and the Nazis and Allies seeking the support of Spain and the all-powerful Franco, the Marquise of Llanzol and Serrano Súñer lived out a clandestine passion. A forbidden love that bore fruit with the birth of a girl: Carmen Díez de Rivera, a figure of enormous significance during the Transition. Although her father never legally recognised her, the scandal was such that it removed him from government for good. “Lo que escondían sus ojos” holds the best-kept secret of Spanish high society in the 1940s, and its protagonists are brought back to life in fictional form thanks to Nieves Herrero, who delves into the soul and ambition of these two individuals. To set the scene for the romance, Nieves Herrero drew on the history of the Mondariz Spa, which at that time was a meeting place for the entire European aristocracy, constructing a typical summer in the Galician spa town where the protagonists go to ‘take the waters’ and where they encounter the cream of society at the time.
This is not the first time the Mondariz Spa has featured in Spanish novels. Years ago, Teresa Viejo included the spa town in her drama *La memoria del agua*, recognising Mondariz’s significance during the European Belle Époque. On that occasion, the journalist and writer told the story of a small spa in southern Spain, La Isabella, and referred throughout the plot to Mondariz as a European pilgrimage site for thermalism, noting, for example, that the first mixed-doubles tennis tournament in Spain was played in the gardens of this spa.
Source: BALNEARIO DE MONDARIZ Communications