The small, century-old hotel in Mollerussa whose owners still live there

MollerussaThe town of Mollerussa is what we all know today (a regional capital with more than 15,000 inhabitants) thanks to two fundamental historical events: the construction of the Urgell Canal, which began irrigating land that had previously been a veritable desert in the mid-19th century, and the simultaneous construction of the train station and a line that would connect the town. A population boom was assured. Hundreds of farmers and merchants took advantage of this favorable economic climate, as did the most far-sighted entrepreneurs.

Two of these visionaries were the husband and wife team formed by Felip Llaudet and Montserrat Romeu. Right next to the station, they set up a small business they called La Fonda del Jardí. It had half a dozen rooms to accommodate, mostly, travelers, merchants, and the occasional stray tourist. The Llaudets, who had two daughters, opened this inn as a complementary activity to their livestock farming. In fact, the family lived in the same establishment, which also housed their corrals and contained many of their livestock buying and selling businesses.

In the 1960s, their daughter Maria, married to Lluís Vila, continued the same trend. But it was one of the third-generation children, Joan Vila, along with his wife Maria Àngels Riba, who gave the hotel its definitive push. They married in 1975 and, shortly after, took over the business and made a significant investment that eventually increased the number of rooms to sixty. They also acquired other properties in the neighborhood to convert them into rental apartments. A true vision of the future: the business is still active today.

Joan and Maria Àngels, now retired, remain the owners of Hotel Jardí. The business gets its name from the fact that it once featured a magnificent green space with a pond, complete with swans. Subsequent expansions necessitated reducing the garden to a smaller, but symbolic, space. But the most significant aspect is that this couple still lives in the upper part of the building, just as their ancestors did. To get home, they still enter through the hotel's automatic doors and through the main lobby, just like any other guests.

Joan and his younger sister Marta, the two current owners of the business, also grew up in the same inn. "I remember when I was little, I would spend hours talking to guests and going down the hotel stairs on my backside," confesses Joan, a fourth-generation Vila owner who is now 46 years old and has three children.

The hotel continues to operate at the same pace, although current times are not good for a sector dominated by large hotel chains. Competition from tourist apartments and the difficulty of finding a stable workforce are affecting them, but they are confident of keeping the business alive for at least another generation. "I don't know if any of my children will take over, but one way or another the business will continue for a few more decades," says Vila. "I inherited this business and I have no right to destroy it."

To make this possible, the Vila brothers have a very clear strategy: to build employee loyalty with good pay, rotations, and flexible hours. "Empathy for employees, pampering and caring for them, is the key to making the business work," says the managing director. They currently have a staff of twenty, many of whom have long experience in the family business.

Another strategy of the Vila brothers is to diversify their activity to consolidate their chances of survival. Mollerussa doesn't thrive on tourism and is, ultimately, too small a city to sustain a three-star hotel like the Jardí. Therefore, the managers diversify their offerings to attract the maximum number of potential clients, most of them workers.

"We can attract up to three different types of clients, from the worker who needs a fairly affordable room to the top executive who requests a space of more than thirty square meters, including engineers who come to spend a few weeks in Mollerussa and need a kitchen to cook their own meals." "We've grown and expanded our services in recent years, including apartments, suites, and aparthotels, as well as parking space rentals, shopping malls, and numerous other services," he adds.

In its more than one hundred years of history, Hotel Jardí has endured all sorts of historical vicissitudes: two dictatorships (those of Primo de Rivera and Franco), the ravages of the Civil War and the years following, and a severe real estate crisis in the 21st century. But what Joan Vila finds most impressive was the pandemic. "They closed the hotel from morning to afternoon," he recalls. They were out of business for several months, and then customers trickled in. "We assumed the important thing was to be able to serve long-time guests," says Joan. Because at Hotel Jardí, the owners know many of their guests personally. "It's like a little family," he concludes.