Overview

As you can see from one of my other reviews, the foundation of this holiday to Spain was a voyage on the Plymouth to Santander overnight ferry. Then what I needed to do was find a hotel within reasonable driving distance of Santander with an accessible family room where I could stay with my partner and our teenage son for the main part of our holiday. This involved a lot of research using Booking.com, which I find useful because it has a filter showing hotels that have at least some degree of accessibility (although I never, ever rely on just the information on the site and always contact hotels directly about their access before confirming my booking). The coastal city of Gijon is about two hours' drive west from Santander, and it's not really known as a tourist destination, but I chose it because I discovered it had a beach with amphibious wheelchairs (I'll write a separate review about that). Hotel Silken is about 10 minutes' walk or wheel from that beach, and they had a large accessible room with space for an extra bed, so they were the winner! The Silken is a four-star hotel that looks mainly aimed at business travellers and therefore isn't cheap, but the fact that we were able to fit into one room made it affordable for us, and the place was absolutely worth the money. It's in a working part of town overlooking a large car park and a railway station, but this wasn't about the view. Restaurants, cafes and bars were in plentiful supply nearby, and the hotel proved to be an excellent base not just for the local beaches but for drives up to the mountains and visits to museums and ancient churches. Gijon is also a good choice you're after "authenticity" from your holiday, because there seriously weren't any non-Spanish visitors for miles around apart from us! There were plenty of locals and Spanish tourists, but foreign tourists are clearly so rare that there isn't much English spoken even at restaurants and museums. Luckily, my partner speaks Spanish quite well, and the staff at the Hotel Silken offer English and French as well as Spanish. Inside the hotel, the staff were nice, the lifts were good, the accessible bathroom was spacious and clean, there was plenty of space for my scooter to get around in the foyer, bar and restaurant, and the breakfast was incredible. One tip: don't book the breakfast in advance as part of your booking, because when you check in and they ask you at that point whether you'd like breakfast, they offer it at a lower rate. One thing I particularly liked about our room is that it had a little armchair just right for me to use when I was getting dressed or reading my book. The only thing about the room that was a bit of a shame was that the minibar fridge didn't work, although to be fair they warned me about this at reception and happily took my medicines to keep in a fridge behind the scenes downstairs, retrieving them promptly whenever I needed them. Another slight drawback was that the hotel's pool wasn't accessible, but I didn't really mind because I could go to the nearby accessible beach. Overall, I'd like to stress how pleased I was with Gijon as a destination for wheelchair-users. This unassuming working city is mostly flat, has dropped kerbs everywhere and includes features like a disabled loo in the supermarket. Even the old town (about 20 minutes' walk or wheel from Hotel Silken) had reasonably smooth pavements and wasn't too cobbly. I'm not saying all the establishments were step-free, and you'll struggle to find accessible loos in bars, cafes and restaurants, but there was a general sense of wanting to welcome and support wheelchair users. It seems like a place disabled people in Spain want to live as well as visit, because every time I went out on the streets, I saw other people using wheelchairs and scooters.

Transport & Parking

You'll need to use the hotel's own basement car park as we did, because street parking is in very high demand. This was fine if a bit tight to get into, and the basement parking did have some blue badge spaces, but you had to pay extra even if you were staying in the hotel, and it was quite pricey.

Access

Very happy with access - see my main review. I'd also like to mention that there we saw several other wheelchair-users staying there, so word has obviously got round in Spain.

Toilets

Lovely clean accessible loo with good handrails in our hotel bathroom

Staff

I was a tiny bit nervous about the staff, because they came across as a bit brusque in our email exchanges before we went, but that was probably just the language barrier, because they turned out to be delightful in person and had clearly gone to some trouble to set up our accessible room with an extra bed before we arrived.

Photos