Hacienda Zorita Wine Hotel

A former monastery near Salamanca where the wine cellar is so vast it couldn't hold everything, so they filled the old chapel with oak barrels right up to the altar. This wine hotel keeps forty rooms deliberately spare, stone walls thick as fortress walls, wooden beams, riverside quiet, and almost no distractions. The organic farm supplies the cheese and ham; the tasting room is where you put it all together, glass in hand, living considerably better than the monks ever did.