Six crowd-beating Mediterranean hotels for summer

While hopefuls struggle to get into La Casa de la Colina -

IBIZA'S

...best private villa, costing £26,000 a month - lesser fashionistas can content themselves with Les Terrasses. On a Balearic better known for gurning Scousers, this is a hideaway of the very first order. Owned by a hippy who came here in the 1960s, it's located on a hidden hillside, in a whitewashed and baby-blue finca 20 minutes' drive from Ibiza Town. With nine rooms and two pools, the aesthetic is essentially rustic, featuring simple cotton throws, distressed walls and wooden window shutters. The caveat is no restaurant for lunch or dinner. But then Ibiza is a place where you will want to watch your weight - on beaches like Cala Jondal, boys wear Speedo briefs while the women sport splicing diamanté thongs.

Doubles from £82 B&B; reservations 00 34 971 332 643.

MAJORCA

Forget the last-minute selfcatering package with apartment "allocated on arrival" that leaves you stuffed like a sardine in a concrete jungle. For a cheap, chic holiday pick up a budget flight to Majorca with Go (www. gofly.com; returns from £83) and book in to The Portixol flanking the harbour, two miles outside Palma. The perfect coupling of Spanish sunshine and Scandinavian design - the owners are Swedish - this 23-room hotel has been recently refurbished. It is now as good as an ode to Wallpaper*, with low, cherrywood platform beds, immaculate all-white bathrooms, and a sleek pool flanked by streamlined sunloungers. The restaurant's reputation is well established, serving some of the best seafood in town. Room rates are beginning to seduce even the most hardened devotee of Deià (Majorca's A-list village frequented by the likes of Catherine Zeta-Jones).

Doubles from £99 B&B; reservations 00 34 971 27 18 00.

SPAIN

With half of Notting Hill decamping to Andalucia - trustafarians to Gaucin, 30 minutes from the coast, kitesurfing City boys to Tarifa - Spain's Costa del Sol is shedding its Torremolinos reputation. For weekending regulars who haven't yet secured their second home, The Hurricane Hotel remains the chosen hideaway, at the gates of the Mediterranean, overlooking the Straits of Gibraltar, a five-minute drive from Tarifa proper. But why not stay longer? The 28 rooms, three suites and two apartments are simply decorated, whitewashed and Moorish-style, with a preponderance of arches, balconies, quiet corners and expansive subtropical gardens wending down to a golden, gently sloping beach. In the restaurant: own-grown herbs and vegetables, organic, locally sourced meats and simple renditions of the freshest possible seafood. A hideaway, yes, but not a place to don the same Voyage frock you last wore at 192 in the summer of '99. Someone you know is bound to spot you.

Doubles from £54 B&B; reservations 00 34 956 68 49 19.

TURKEY

Bodrum is something of a lowrent Mecca, not where you'd expect to find Turkey's smartest hotel, The Ada Hotel, aka "Babington-House-on-Sea", where Istanbul's glitterati rub shoulders with the few foreigners party to this Aegean secret. There are 14 rooms - all with private terraces, some with four-posters swathed in voile, others with separate coirfloor sitting rooms. The presidential and penthouse suites share a private swimming pool. There is also an authentically steamy Turkish marble hammam as well as a larger pool flanked with loungers. New for summer 2002: two restaurants, one beachside (at the Ada's beach club, five minutes walk away), the other located in the hotel proper from Changa, the hottest restaurant to have opened in Istanbul for years with Peter Gordon of London's Sugar Club as consultant chef. Expect rebel renditions of Turkish staples, such as grilled halloumi cheese in vine leaves with sweet chilli sauce.

Doubles from £168 b&b; reservations 00 90 252 377 5915.

FRANCE

It would be an epiphany to find a hotel on the Cap Ferrat - that epicentre of glamour on the CÙte d'Azur - for under £60 a night. As the search continues, you're better off heading west to the similarsounding, but far less frequented, Cap Ferret, on the west coast two hours north of Biarritz (watch this spot: Karl Lagerfeld recently moved to the neighbourhood). Here you will find a genuine hideaway: fishing boats not gin palaces, deliciously simple Breton oysters instead of lobsters trussed up with truffles, untouched white-sand beaches rather than a sea of breasts and botox-enhanced buttocks (that's Cap Ferrat). The place to stay is Maison du Bassin, a restaurant with seven simple but ineffably stylish rooms furnished with leather armchairs, china washbasins, all-white ProvenÁal-style quilts and colonial-style beds. Romantic, unpretentious and cheap as chips.

Doubles from £57 room only; reservations 00 33 5 56 60 60 63.

ITALY

Until Dolce and Gabbana open their much-anticipated hotel on Stromboli, the Aeolian island of choice remains Panarea, a dot of a rock with an exceptional 30-room property, Hotel Raya. The look is quintessentially Med with thick and cooling, curved, whitewashed walls with oleander awnings, blushes of coral pink, and fuchsia bougainvillaea. It is a place of quiet (no televisions or buzzing scooters), where you will want to hole up and lounge on the terrace, whiling away the summer for a pinch of the price you'd pay on nearby Capri. The hotel clings to a precipitous hillside affording views of the uninhabited islets of Basiluzzo, Dattilo, Lisca Bianca and Bottaro from private terraces. All 30 rooms are airconditioned, there's a bar and restaurant, and the hotel claims to be eco friendly.

Doubles from £95 B&B; reservations 00 39 090 983 013.