From The Dolomites To Agrigento

Seven generations of Sanoner hoteliers, born in the Dolomites, have built their first southern resort above the coast of Agrigento: low blocks of clay and volcanic stone, wrapped around a serious wellness offering and a WWF reserve.

The Sanoner family are seventh-generation hoteliers, and their story began at the other end of Italy: five generations back, a forebear opened the first inn the family ever ran, high in the Dolomites. ADLER Spa Resort Sicilia, which opened in 2022, is their first venture south: a luxury spa resort on the south coast of Sicily. It occupies thirteen hectares above the golden beaches of the Agrigento coast, on the edge of the Torre Salsa reserve, 760 hectares of fragrant Mediterranean scrubland, dunes and cliffs under WWF protection, and the whole place takes its cues from that setting.

Sustainability here is less doctrine than the only sensible answer to a piece of land like this. Hugo Demetz, the Sanoners' longtime architect, has shaped a resort that defers to the ground it stands on. Low, single-storey blocks meld into the hillside, their walls clad in unbaked Sicilian clay that breathes with the climate and in tufo, the volcanic stone of Etna. The floors are opus signinum, the cooling Roman technique of crushed brick and lime mortar, pressed back into modern Sicilian service. Seen from the dunes below, the resort barely registers against the landscape.

Inside, the rooms borrow their palette from the scrub and the shore: earthy tones, natural timbers, handcrafted panels and soft, burnt-orange furnishings, warmth without weight. Wide glazing and private terraces keep the sea always in view and the gardens always within reach. The shared spaces are deliberately permeable, with water threaded through the interiors to draw the eye out to the horizon.

Wellness is not a wing here so much as the organising principle. At the centre sits a 3,200-square-metre spa, built from the same clay and tufo and held to the same restraint, with heated indoor and outdoor saline pools, a panoramic thalasso pool and a 25-metre sports pool for laps, plus Finnish and bio saunas and a steam bath. The ADLER Med Centre layers in tailored health and detox programmes, while the treatment menu runs from Sicilian Sun to Ayurveda Relax. Days are loosely strung around all of it: daily yoga and fitness, guided hikes and e-bike tours into the Torre Salsa reserve, and beach walks timed to dawn and dusk.

The Sicilian chef Giuseppe Schimmenti cooks to a zero-mile principle, drawing fruit, vegetables and herbs from the resort's own orto, the kitchen garden strewn among the clay-clad buildings. Expect orange juice pressed from trees you can see from the terrace, raw honey from the reintroduced Sicilian black bee, pasta and pizza from ancient grains milled down the road in Siculiana, ricotta and pecorino from the neighbouring hills, and fish landed that morning. Dinner is at the gourmet Seaview Restaurant, lunch at the easier Osteria, drinks at the Sunset Bar, and the wines, fittingly, come from the family's own biodynamic estate in Tuscany. Beyond the gates of ADLER Spa Resort Sicilia lie the Valley of the Temples and the white cliffs of the Scala dei Turchi; below, a private beach and the sea, three hundred metres down.

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