Hostels, hostals and mountain refuges in Andorra

Some trips don’t need a hotel. If you’re on your own, out walking and after nothing more than a shower and a bed, or simply watching the pennies, Andorra has hostals, youth hostels and, best of all, a network of mountain refuges that I’d put among the country’s real highlights. Here’s what the official sources let me read, which isn’t everything, and how I’d go about it.

A word on hostal versus hostel

British visitors often trip over this. A hostal, in Andorra as in Spain, is usually a small, no-frills hotel with private rooms, while a hostel is the backpacker kind with shared dorms. Andorra Turisme’s accommodation types include hostals, youth hostels and refuges, each with its own search page. The catch is that those listings load with JavaScript and come up empty when read openly. So I can’t give you a full list or a count, and I won’t pad it out with names from a booking site.

What they do have is a tax advantage. Tourist tax goes by category, and stays without stars pay the lowest band, €1 per guest per night from 16 upwards, half a euro less than a two or three-star, plus 4.5% IGI. To compare with everything else, see cheap hotels in Andorra.

La Massana, the rucksack traveller’s base

The parish where official listings do have names is La Massana, whose council runs a tourism site with its accommodation. The Hostal Palanques sits 200 metres from the La Massana gondola, with free ski storage and a restaurant serving a daily set menu of Pyrenean dishes. It’s a building with a past, which Andorra Turisme highlights in its La Massana guide for its role during the Second World War.

The other is the KY Mountain Hostel, which describes itself as a little corner of the high mountains, with shared, inclusive spaces aimed at people travelling alone or in groups. I haven’t seen a category for it, so I won’t give one.

La Massana works for this kind of trip for two reasons. In winter, the gondola lifts you to Pal Arinsal without a car. In summer, the Comapedrosa Nature Park and its refuges are on the doorstep. And if you’d rather wake up somewhere quieter, the stone village of Pal, more than 1,500 metres up and with its own ski sector, sits just above. The parish is covered in hotels in La Massana.

Mountain refuges, the other way to sleep in Andorra

This is where Andorra shines. Andorra Turisme counts around thirty refuges around the country, and four of them, Comapedrosa, Juclar, l’Illa and the Borda de Sorteny, are equipped with showers, mattresses, bedding and a basic meal service. The rest are simpler, meant for a night on the trail.

If you like walking, there’s a little game I think is a great idea. The refuge passport is free from tourist offices, gets stamped at each refuge on the GRP, GR-7 or GR-11, and is handed in at the Andorra la Vella office for a certificate and a small gift. The Coronallacs, a 92 km loop in five stages starting in Escaldes, links exactly those four equipped refuges. All of that is in mountain huts in Andorra and the GRP round Andorra.

What about Andorra la Vella?

It’s the most common search, hostels in the capital, and the one I can answer least well with a source. I haven’t found a readable official list with names. What I can offer is the reasoning. If your coach from the airport drops you in the capital and you plan to get around by bus, what you want isn’t so much a hostel as a cheap bed near the bus station, where every national line starts. A simple two or three-star hotel does the job and pays only 50 cents more tax a night. And off a late coach, a bed two streets from the station is worth more than any breakfast. Remember too that there’s no airport in Andorra, so your first and last nights often hinge on coach times rather than flights.

Sleeping out without a refuge

If you like the idea of sleeping outdoors but with a bit more comfort than a hut, there are campsites, glamping and rural houses. I cover those separately in camping in Andorra.