This is a small, family run hotel, really pretty basic. The rooms as well as the bathrooms are small although impeccably clean and the mattresses are on the hard side. But now comes the good news. Just below your window there is gently burbling brook which will lull you to sleep on a warm summer night. The dinners, served with panache by the owner's son are ample and tasty, the baby lamb chops are particularly good. In the morning you will find your napkins from the previous evening neatly folded at the same table you occupied at dinner, a touch which my lovely travelling companion found particularly charming, and there is freshly squeezed orange juice. The bill for all this, room, two dinners, two breakfasts, will come to perhaps $60, which will make up for whatever shortcomings the place may have. But the chief reason for staying there is that the hotel is within a hundred yards of the magnificent abbey of Santo Domingo. This is one of the glories of Spain. The Baroque exterior is unremarkable but on the inside, in the cloister, there are capitals with the greatest early Romanesque (ca. 1070) carving in Spain. And in the evening, between the cocktail hour and dinner, you can attend the vesper services in the abbey and listen to the monks intoning their justly famous Gregorian chants and, at the conclusion of the service, observe them departing in a solemn single file procession . If you're lucky, after breakfast, you might catch sight of the monks in procession to a little hilltop chapel overlooking the hotel, something that transported me straight into the heart of the middle ages. There are other hotels in Silos, but they're not well run, this is the one of choice. But a word of caution, avoid staying there in the cold season, the central heating is minimal.
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