The 2026 MICHELIN Keys in Spain: what changed for the hotels we rate

The MICHELIN Key is three years old. The Guide began awarding it to hotels in 2024, on its own criteria — architecture and interior design, service, personality, value for money and what the hotel gives back to its surroundings — and the 2026 selection, published on 18 September, is the third.

Spain grew by thirteen hotels, from 109 to 122: five with three Keys, seventeen with two and one hundred with one. Six of the changes concern hotels we rate on the Unlisted Index, and we have rechecked every one of our Spanish hotels against the Guide's own listings, one by one, rather than trusting a summary.

The six changes, in one table

Seven lines, because the one that went down counts too.

Two hotels move up to two Keys

Esperit Roca has fifteen rooms inside a military fortress built at the end of the 19th century on the Sants Metges hill, ten kilometres north of Girona, which the Roca brothers of El Celler de Can Roca turned into a restaurant with a MICHELIN star, a Catalan dining room, a distillery and a cellar of some 80,000 bottles. Two Keys puts it level with Mas de Torrent as the highest-rated stay on the Costa Brava.

Cap Vermell is the other promotion: a five-star resort of 142 rooms built like a Mallorcan village in the Canyamel valley, near Capdepera, with villas, two pools and the Serenitas spa. Mallorca now has seven hotels with two Keys, and six of them are in our guide.

A hotel that opened in June and came in with two

Mandarin Oriental Punta Negra opened in June 2026 on the Punta Negra headland at Costa d'en Blanes, a wooded peninsula with two small coves of its own past Puerto Portals. It is Mandarin Oriental's first hotel in Mallorca: 131 rooms and suites, a spa by the sea and Matsuhisa over the water. Three months later it entered the selection with two Keys, which is unusual for a hotel that has only had one season to settle.

With it, Mallorca now has 24 hotels with a Key, more than any Spanish city: Barcelona has 18 and Madrid 13. We rate 23 of the 24.

Three first Keys

Mas d'en Bruno, in Torroja del Priorat, is a five-century estate turned into 24 suites with terraces above the llicorella vineyards, with an infinity pool facing the Montsant range. It is the second hotel in the Priorat with a Key, after the three-Key Terra Dominicata.

Son Ermità, near Ferreries, is one of the two 18th-century manor houses that Vestige Collection restored across 800 hectares of protected Menorcan countryside. Menorca now has seven hotels with a Key, all of them in our Menorca guide.

César is the first hotel on Lanzarote with a Key: twenty adults-only rooms at La Asomada, on land that belonged to César Manrique's family, with the volcanoes behind and the sea below.

And one that lost it

The Principal Madrid, a 1917 corner building at the start of the Gran Vía, held a Key in 2025 and is not in the 2026 list of thirteen Key hotels in Madrid. It stays in our guide — the Key is one outside check among several, not our criterion — and its page now says what happened. It is still the stay for the Gran Vía and its rooftops.

What did not change

The top of the list is the same. Five hotels in Spain hold three Keys: Terra Dominicata in the Priorat, Abadía Retuerta on the Duero, Torre del Marqués in the Matarraña, the Mandarin Oriental Ritz in Madrid and Atrio in Cáceres. All five are now in our guide: Atrio, the last of them, joined it on 13 October 2026.

Outside Spain, Portugal has 69 hotels with a Key — two with three, fourteen with two and fifty-three with one — and eleven of them are in the Algarve, six of those in our Algarve guide. Morocco has 31, and the listing confirmed two Keys for Amanjena, which we had not claimed for lack of a primary source.

How we checked it

Hotel by hotel, against the Guide's own country listings on 22 September 2026, filtered by distinction: 122 hotels in Spain, 69 in Portugal, 31 in Morocco. That is how we found the two things a summary would not tell us: Amanjena's two Keys, and that Balcón de Córdoba, which one of our comparison tables credited with a Key, does not hold one. Both are fixed.

The full list of the Spanish Key hotels we rate — 71 of the 122, by region — is in our MICHELIN Key guide.