The luxury Gran Meliá Sancti Petri hotel’s gourmet restaurant boasts a bright, elegant and minimalist design – the only thing adorning the walls of the dining room are the silhouettes of shoals of fish and curtains made from traditional hemp rope. Such is the maritime influence that you can almost taste and smell the salty sea air! Given that this is the offshoot of the extraordinary Aponiente restaurant in El Puerto de Santa María, guests can savour (via the Planeta Agua menu, with its two options that differ in their number of courses) many of the dishes that have led to acclaimed chef’s Ángel León’s worldwide reputation as “El Chef del Mar”. The experience begins with enticing appetisers (accompanied by wine from Chiclana) in the bar at the entrance and continues in the dining room, where the best maritime fish and seafood (sea urchins, shrimp, mackerel, dogfish etc) take centre stage. The seaweed tarte tatin, a dessert with an intense green colour (due to plankton) that comes with a croissant ice-cream took us completely by surprise!