The Palauet stands in the historic heart of Balaguer, in the old Jewish quarter, its main facade on Miracle Street near the Placa Mercadal. That square has hosted a market every Saturday for more than 800 years, and it still does. The back of the house is no ordinary rear wall; it is a stretch of the town's original fortifications, dropping toward the Segre river. Through the courtyard, hemmed in by thick stone, a passage leads to a lookout the locals call lo Portalet, a small opening over the water. From the upper terraces the view runs along the Segre as it passes through the city and out to the Montsec mountains standing blue in the distance. The house is also known as Can Tarragona, and it shares the old wall passage with its neighbors, so the fortification runs on unbroken behind several houses at once.

The oldest part of the house is underground. The basement is of Jewish origin, still legible in its water pipes, and it holds what the family calls the celler, with two wells or reservoirs once used to keep oil and other goods, alongside the old stable. In one of the basement rooms sits a massive stone table cut from a single piece. Most evocative of all is a passage, now walled shut, that once connected the house directly to the neighboring Church of Sant Joseph, which had itself been a synagogue in earlier centuries. To descend here is to move through the buried architecture of a community that lived, worked, and worshipped along this wall long before the mansion above took its present shape.

Over the last half-century the house has been restored piece by piece, much of it furnished with objects rescued from churches of the region that were falling into ruin, saving them from disappearing altogether. Through the main entrance, a hall floored in stone slabs and lined with monastic stalls gives way to stairs, a game room, and the principal suites above. Master craftsmen brought the interiors back: the carpenter Ton Camarasa and the painter Angel Soldevila recovered the original ceiling paintings, moldings, and coffered woodwork, while mosaics and old wooden floors were preserved beneath. The grandest room holds a mirror from Murano; the dining room keeps a fireplace of solid wood; the bedrooms are dressed in imperial and Venetian style. Above the main suites, the second floor holds six bedrooms, several opening onto terraces that hang directly over the Segre. Higher still lies the attic the region calls lo Perche, its original wooden beams and worn old floor tiles left exposed, a cool and quiet space tucked beneath the roof where the house feels most like the past it came from.

The manor's deeper history reaches back to 1333, when the Jews were expelled from the older part of Balaguer and the settlement shifted toward what would become the Placa Mercadal. The building grew and changed across the centuries, acquiring its Renaissance facade in the 1700s, which gave the interior much of its current structure. In 1930 the Carmelite Sisters of Charity took over the property and ran it as a girls' school and convent until the late 1950s. The library that survived the Civil War, with its lives of saints and old sermons, came from the Franciscan convent of Sant Domenec, and today the house lives on as a hotel, its guests sleeping above a cellar that predates them by many hundreds of years.