Built for the moments that become stories

There's a moment in every story where someone stops asking what if and starts asking what now.

For Alex López, that moment came in a hospital room in 2015, when cancer rewrote the entire blueprint of his life. He was 25 years old, working as a banker in Barcelona's treasury department, following a script that made sense on paper but had started to feel like someone else's handwriting. The illness didn't just threaten his body, it dismantled his priorities, stripped away the noise and forced him to ask what actually mattered when everything else fell away.

When he came out the other side, his family gave him money for one thing: a getaway with Maria, the woman he'd loved since they were 16. They tried to book a stay at Cabanes als Arbres, the first treehouse hotel in Spain and discovered it was fully booked nearly a year ahead. Most people would've picked somewhere else and moved on. Alex saw something different: a market screaming for escape with almost no one answering and more than that, a vision of the life he actually wanted to live. He didn't just want a break from the city, he wanted to build something that mattered in a way money never would, something that would give other people the kind of moments that had suddenly become more precious to him than ever.

The —— drive

Maria had spent a practice year teaching in La Garrotxa, a volcanic region in Catalonia thick with forests, rolling hills and villages that felt like they'd been carved out of time itself. Through her, Alex already knew the area and one day he got in the car, drove from Barcelona, passed through the tunnels, and arrived in La Vall de Bianya - a tiny village cradled between mountains. What he did next sounds almost reckless in hindsight: he walked straight into the town hall and pitched his dream to strangers. He wanted to build treehouses, but not rustic cabins—real treehouses with hot tubs, proper bathrooms, and the comfort you'd expect in a city hotel, all surrounded by forest.

The town hall told him there was only one place in the village where it might be possible and gave him a phone number. After many meetings, that first location fell through. But the architect he met during that process didn't give up, and one day he showed Alex a 200-acre estate owned by a family: Carlos, a man who'd bought the land with dreams of a rural hotel, and his son Alfonso, around Alex's age. Alex explained his vision: not a hotel, but something closer to an experience, cabins where couples could propose, families could reconnect, and people could step outside the noise long enough to hear themselves again. Carlos and Alfonso were so moved by the vision Alex laid out that they chose partnership over transaction, joining the project with their land, their resources, and the strength of a shared belief in something that was, at the time, only an idea.

The —— house

The estate Alex stepped onto wasn't blank canvas, it was alive with history, layered with the lives of people who'd worked, survived, and built on that land for centuries. Locals say it may be one of the oldest properties in La Vall de Bianya, possibly a thousand years old, though no one has papers that far back. The main house carries a date carved into stone: 1636. But before that, the buildings stood elsewhere on the land, until earthquakes in the 14th century brought them down and forced families to rebuild in the locations where they stand today.

For centuries, it functioned as a masia, the traditional Catalan estate system where a lord lived in the main house and tenant farmers - masovers - lived in surrounding buildings, working the land and paying rent in crops and labor. It was a self-sufficient world: grain, livestock, vegetables, survival through seasons and generations. In the 20th century, around 14 members of the same family still lived there, farming, producing what they needed. The last descendant had no children, and when she turned nearly 90, she sold the estate. In 2015, Carlos bought it. And a year later, Alex arrived, not to erase that history, but to write the next chapter in a story that had been unfolding for centuries.

Two years —— alone

This is the part of the story that shocks us every time. To make the dream real, Alex lived alone on the property for almost two years. Not in a romantic cabin with a fireplace and a view, but in one of the old stone buildings while construction tore through the land around him. They rebuilt the masia into shared spaces - reception, restaurant, bathrooms. They carved access paths through forest that had never needed them before. They brought water and electricity to places that had existed for centuries without it. Alfonso and Carlos were there in the trenches with him, using their machines—tractors, excavators—to move the earth and make the impossible start looking like something real.

But Alex stayed. Every day. Alone with the silence, the cold, and the single-minded focus that comes from knowing exactly what you're building.

When we asked him how he pushed through, his answer was pure clarity: when he wants something, he fights until he achieves it. He doesn't focus on the obstacles or the hard work, he focuses on building the dream until it becomes real.

And then there's another detail that reveals everything about his character: before opening, Alex - who'd spent years as a banker, not a chef - worked two months inside a two-Michelin-star restaurant to learn cuisine. He called it brutal work and lost six kilos in the process, but that commitment was the point: he wanted to learn what true quality meant, absorb the standards, and bring that level of craft back to his own kitchen.

The —— opening

They opened on November 1, 2019 with two treehouses and two glamping tents. At the beginning, it was just Alex and Maria running everything - cleaning, cooking, reception, check-ins - working 50 days straight without a single day off. And then COVID hit. March 2020 brought a forced closure, two months of silence right after the most intense sprint of their lives. Most people would've seen that as the end or at least a sign to scale back. Alex saw it as a chance to rebuild the structure of the business: hire a chef, add reception support, bring in cleaning staff, and when they reopened, keep building—step by step, cabin by cabin—until they reached what they have today: 10 cabins, 2 summer glamping tents, 14 employees, a restaurant, and a dream that survived.

The —— experience

When we asked Alex to define luxury, he didn't talk about marble lobbies or Michelin stars or exclusivity. He talked about something quieter, and in doing so, redefined what the word could mean: "To be in peace. With the person you want beside you. Enjoying the moment without interruption with all the comfort of a refined hotel, but inside the forest where silence feels like luxury."

That sentence contains the entire philosophy of Cabanyes entre Valls: it's not about choosing between comfort and nature, or between luxury and authenticity. It's about refusing that false choice entirely and building something that holds both.

Cabanyes entre Valls isn't designed to impress you in the way luxury hotels often try to, it's designed to hold you in a way that feels protective rather than performative. Cabins have a hot tub where you can sit under the stars,and interiors that feel warm and lived-in rather than staged for a photoshoot. What makes the experience feel different is the way every detail is designed around one idea: you should be able to disappear into nature without sacrificing the comfort that lets you actually relax.

The restaurant serves local, certified food rooted in La Garrotxa's traditional cuisine, with a touch of fusion that adds depth without losing the region's identity. And here's the detail that reveals everything about Alex and Alfons’s philosophy: breakfast and dinner are delivered directly to your cabin, so you don't have to leave at night or walk through the forest in the dark. You can stay inside the bubble you came for - you, the person you love, and the moment, uninterrupted.

The —— memories

When we asked Alex and Alfons what brings them the most joy in this work, they didn't talk about occupancy or profit. They talked about the excitement they hear when guests book - the ones planning proposals, celebrating milestones, carving out time with the people they love. It's knowing that the place they built is holding those moments, protecting them, making them possible. They imagine the future: a couple sitting with their children years from now, recounting the night they got engaged in a cabin in the forest. That story will be told and retold, passed down, remembered. And Alex and Alfons built the place where it happened. That's what makes it worth it - not the business metrics, but the knowledge that they've created space for memories that will last longer than anything else. They don't sell accommodations. They sell the moments that become stories.