Interest in the coastal Spanish town is booming, thanks to the rise of remote work, the area’s LGBTQ-friendly atmosphere and its proximity to Barcelona
6 min
In their post pandemic search for a European second home, Florida’s Martin and Patricia Tantow had a lot of boxes to tick.
The couple, who confined their search to the mainland Mediterranean coast, wanted sea views, walkable beach and town access, and a unit that was easy to renovate—or, as they call it, a “liveable fixer-upper.”
They found what they were looking for in Sitges, a Spanish resort town that had been under the radar for U.S. buyers and vacationers.
Sitges, with around 30,000 year-round residents, is known for its sandy beaches, 19th-century villas, 21st-century mansions, quaint historic centre and thriving residential real-estate market. Only a 25-minute drive from Barcelona’s international airport, the community is one of three select resorts that compete for the title of mainland Spain’s most expensive.
Home prices in Sitges average $457 per square foot, up 7.3% in the past year and 21% in the past five years, according to Idealista, a Spanish real estate website. Jesús Encinar, CEO and chairman of Idealista, says that Cadaqués, up the Catalan coast from Sitges and near France, is now at the top, with average prices in March reaching $575 per square foot. Málaga in the south of Spain is now at $458 per square foot, edging past Sitges.
Of the three, Sitges is the most convenient for trans-Atlantic air connections—and, local homeowners say, year-round charm. Smaller and less glitzy than Marbella, Sitges has temperate winters and hot summers, and it’s bigger and more accessible than remote whitewashed Cadaqués, where life dies down in the chillier offseason.
The Tantows paid 1.3 million euros (about $1.39 million) in July 2023 for a compact 2,300-square-foot Sitges home on a steep 1/5th-acre lot, offering prized southern exposures and expansive sea views. They plan to divide their time about equally between their primary Sarasota, Fla., home and Spain, where they can work remotely.
Able to live in the 1990s property while wrapping up the renovation, the couple has spent about $270,000 on refurbishments, and they plan to spend around $50,000 more on the four-bedroom home before they’re done.
“We painted inside and outside, and we opened things up a bit by breaking down some walls,” says Patricia Tantow, a marketing executive at an IT company. Other structural improvements included new solar panels, energy-efficient doors and windows, and insulation upgrades. They also decided to convert a lower-level gym into a home office and gaming area.
The couple, both 50, view the investment as a vacation home for now and a potential retirement home later. Patricia Tantow still seems a bit surprised at where they ended up.
“My dream was to buy in the south of France,” she recalls. “But then I came to Sitges and there was something special here. It’s very cute, but very diverse as well—you feel like you belong here. So I changed my mind about France and said, ‘Let’s try to make this happen.’”
Long popular with the LGBTQ community, Sitges traditionally attracts second-home buyers from Northern Europe, as well as elsewhere in Spain. Now the number of American buyers is rising, says the Tantows’ agency, Lucas Fox, where in-house sales to Americans doubled in 2023 compared with the year before. The rise of remote work and LGBTQ word-of-mouth are each helping to fuel interest, says the agency.
American visitors to the town are also increasing. Marina Norwell, of Oliver’s Travels, the U.K.-based villa-rental specialists, says inquiries from the U.S. quadrupled in 2023 from the year before.
Norwell says a top choice for villa-minded Americans is a 10-bedroom country house with a saltwater swimming pool, about 15 minutes from the centre of Sitges, with a high-season weekly rate of about $18,500. Norwell says it’s popular with larger groups.
Sitges is something of a paradox, say residents. Known for its freewheeling nightlife in high season, it becomes a quieter, family-friendly community the rest of the year. The Tantows, who relocated during the pandemic from San Francisco to Florida, said they have no qualms about letting their two children, 9 and 11, explore on their own—something they couldn’t imagine back in San Francisco.
A desirable setting to raise children was also on the minds of full-time Dutch residents Ben Aquina and his wife, Carmen Aquina. The couple moved to Sitges in 2015 from the Netherlands to give their two sons, then 12 and 13, an international experience, he says.
The family rented for two years “to make sure that everything would go well with the kids,” says Aquina, a 63-year-old retired businessman. Then he and his wife, now 57, paid about $2.8 million in 2017 for a 7,000-square-foot, four-bedroom house on a ½-acre lot in a gated community near the city’s premier golf course, Club de Golf Terramar.
They spent more than $3 million on a gut renovation of the three-level property, originally built in 2004, adding everything from a new kitchen and upstairs terrace to a new outdoor pool.
“We love Sitges,” says Ben Aquina. “Life is so nice; the climate is perfect.”
Now that their sons are attending universities in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, the couple has listed the home for $5.79 million, with Rachel Haslam of Lucas Fox handling the sale. They plan to downsize locally to an apartment, as well as spend more time back in Holland.
At their current asking price, the Aquinas would just about break even, but many Sitges lovers are willing to take a loss, says Jordi Carbonell, sales director for Barcelona’s surrounding areas at Engel & Völkers Spain.
Catalonia led the way in the industrialisation of Spain in the 19th century, and Sitges became a spot for Catalan magnates to build lavish summer villas, often in a style associated with architect Antoni Gaudí up the coast in Barcelona. Still expensive to buy, and often very expensive to modernize, they typically need a new kitchen and new air-conditioning system, and even a new roof, requiring a total investment of almost $10 million to $11 million, says Carbonell. New owners may never resell for that price, he adds, “but some people just love these properties.”
Carbonell says the highest square-foot prices can now be found on Passeig Maritim, the palm-lined boulevard bordering the beach. In 2023, Lucas Fox sold a 1,930-square-foot contemporary apartment on the boulevard’s continuation, Passeig de la Ribera, for $1.6 million, or $831 per square foot, far exceeding the resort’s average.
Both the Tantows and the Aquinas were drawn to the community’s proximity to Barcelona—“Sitges wouldn’t be Sitges without Barcelona,” says venture capitalist Martin Tantow, who says the family relies on direct flights from Miami and California. But they also use it as a getaway to the nearby Penedès wine region, home to Catalonia’s sparkling Cava wines.
Carbonell says Sitges-bound buyers who want more land often head up to Penedès, where luxury properties can come with stables and tennis courts. Meanwhile, budget-minded international buyers who want access to Sitges but more space for their euro are increasingly heading a 15-minute drive away to nearby communities, Sant Pere de Ribes, closer to the vineyards, and Vilanova i la Geltrú, a small city down the coast, where “you can spend 450,000 euros on a home but still enjoy Sitges on the weekends,” he says.
Mary Anne Gibbons and Michael Healy, a couple in their early 70s from Washington, D.C., recently capped off an Iberian holiday with a first-time visit to Sitges, opting for an Oliver’s Travels villa near Sant Pere de Ribes, where they paid around $1,400 in total for four nights in a three-bedroom renovated stone house.
Intending to use the setting as a base for discovering Barcelona, Gibbons says they opted most days to hang out in Sitges instead.
“It’s a really cute town with a very relaxed atmosphere,” says the attorney, who enjoyed the seafront promenade and quaint shops and cafes. “Very chill.”
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3 min
Many luxury hotels only build on their gilded reputations with each passing decade. But others are less fortunate. Here are five long-gone grandes dames that fell from grace—and one that persists, but in a significantly diminished form.
A magnet for celebrities, the Garden of Allah was once the scene-making equivalent of today’s Chateau Marmont. Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner’s affair allegedly started there and Humphrey Bogart lived in one of its bungalows for a time.
Crimean expat Alla Nazimova leased a grand home in Hollywood after World War I, but soon turned it into a hotel, where she prioritised glamorous clientele. Others risked being ejected by guards and a fearsome dog dubbed the Hound of the Baskervilles. Demolished in the 1950s, the site’s now a parking lot.
The Astor family hoped to repeat their success when they opened this sequel to their megahit Waldorf Astoria hotel in 1904. It became an anchor of the nascent Theater District, buzzy (and naughty) enough to inspire Cole Porter to write in “High Society”: “Have you heard that Mimsie Starr…got pinched in the Astor Bar?”
That bar soon gained another reputation. “Gentlemen who preferred the company of other gentlemen would meet in a certain section of the bar,” said travel expert Henry Harteveldt of consulting firm Atmosphere Research. By the 1960s, the hotel had lost its lustre and was demolished; the 54-storey One Astor Plaza skyscraper was built in its place.
In the 1950s, colonial officers around Africa treated Mozambique as an off-duty playground. They flocked, in particular, to the Santa Carolina, a five-star hotel on a gorgeous archipelago off the country’s southern coast.
Run by a Portuguese businessman and his wife, the resort included an airstrip that ferried visitors in and out. Ask locals why the place was eventually reduced to rubble, and some whisper that the couple were cursed—and that’s why no one wanted to take over when the business collapsed in the ’70s. Today, seeing the abandoned, crumbled ruins and murals bleached by the sun, it’s hard to dismiss their superstitions entirely.
The overwater bungalow, a shorthand for barefoot luxury around the world, began in French Polynesia—but not with the locals. Instead, it was a marketing gimmick cooked up by a trio of rascally Americans. They moved to French Polynesia in the late 1950s, and soon tried to capitalise on the newly built international airport and a looming tourism boom.
That proved difficult because their five-room hotel on the island of Raiatea lacked a beach. They devised a fix: building rooms on pontoons above the water. They were an instant phenomenon, spreading around the islands and the world—per fan site OverwaterBungalows.net , there are now more than 9,000 worldwide, from the Maldives to Mexico. That first property, though, is no more.
The Ricker family started out as innkeepers, running a stagecoach stop in Maine in the 1790s. When Hiram Ricker took over the operation, the family expanded into the business by which it would make its fortune: water. Thanks to savvy marketing, by the 1870s, doctors were prescribing Poland Spring mineral water and die-hards were making pilgrimages to the source.
The Rickers opened the Poland Spring House in 1876, and eventually expanded it to include one of the earliest resort-based golf courses in the country, a barber shop, dance studio and music hall. By the turn of the century, it was among the most glamorous resort complexes in New England.
Mismanagement eventually forced its sale in 1962, and both the water operation and hospitality holdings went through several owners and operators. While the water venture retains its prominence, the hotel has weathered less well, becoming a pleasant—but far from luxurious—mid-market resort. Former NYU hospitality professor Bjorn Hanson says attempts at upgrading over the decades have been futile. “I was a consultant to a developer in the 1970s to return the resort to its ‘former glory,’ but it never happened.”
