Casona del Busto

The place is incredible and the staff is lovely. The photos do not do it justice.

We wanted stay near family in Asturias for the total eclipse. This was still available when I was looking for reservations, though it required a 3-night stay. There's no elevator, but fortunately we only had to go up one set of stairs with our suitcases to the room. The room was nice, including a small balcony, and very quiet at night. The bath towels are so soft here! But the shower stall lacks a shelf, I think we were supposed to use the wood stool which we used for a sink vanity instead. There's a lot of night glow from the hotel phone's screen. I ended up placing it on the floor, under the nightstand, to help dampen the light. The breakfast buffet is meat, cheese, pastry, fruit. Had a new fruit here we'd not seen before, toad skin melon, also called a Christmas or Santa Claus melon because it stays edible to December. It was good. The marble pound cake is AWESOME! The chocolate part isn't cake, it's pudding. The yellow cake was also excellent. We had trouble on night 3 getting back into the hotel, as the front door closes early and there's no reception staff on duty. For some reason our room keys weren't unlocking the entrance. We had to call the office and the person was able to unlock it remotely. The only other thing is that parking is in a lot a few blocks away, and at peak times that lot is FULL. Several times hubby ended up circling the streets for a few minutes before returning again to see if anyone had departed to leave a spot open.

I stayed in the family room in August. It has a big problem: you die of heat even with maximum temperatures of 22 degrees outside. It has a large window that you cannot enjoy because the curtains have to be drawn so that the sun does not heat up the room even more. Furthermore, the curtains have a very uncomfortable system for opening and closing. Another problem is the entrance and exit door, the most accessible one and where everyone ends up coming in and going out. They are village doors, the kind they call highway doors in my town in case anyone gets the idea, but with a very difficult latch that makes people slam them 2 or 3 times to manage to close them. This jolts you out of your sleep every time it happens. Otherwise, the breakfast was just okay and the reception staff was very friendly, especially highlighting the service from Valentina.