About Lo Peix
Hi, I'm Joan Arbo López
I run Lo Peix Apartments with my wife. It's the building my mother and her siblings grew up in, my family name, and the place I've kept coming back to my whole life.
The name Lo Peix
López is my mother's family name. In local rapitenc speech, "López" sounds almost identical to "Lo Peix" — "the Fish". When my wife and I started thinking of a name for the apartment, the wordplay was too obvious to ignore.
It's not marketing: it's literally the family name said in the village's own tongue. And it fits the history of the building — generations of my family have lived off the sea and by the sea in the Alfacs Bay.
The first five years
I was born in La Ràpita and lived here until I was five. The whole family shared the building where Lo Peix now stands: my mother, her siblings, my grandparents — both floors occupied, door to door. It was the kind of house where there was always a table set and someone cooking rice.
Even after I moved away, the building never stopped being everyone's home. I'd come back in summer, for Sant Jaume, for the festes del Barri, for any excuse. Today that same house is a holiday apartment. To me it's not a tourist product: it's my grandmother's home with a good kettle in the kitchen.
Barcelona, Madrid and the road back
I studied in Barcelona and ended up living in Madrid, where I currently work as Director at Instituto de Diseño Agéntico. Before that I was UX Engineer Manager at Telefónica, Amazon and Western Union. Almost two decades building digital products.
What I've learned along the way is that what works best — in a product, on a website, in a home — is usually the most honest and the most local. That's the lens I try to apply to this blog: every recommendation is real, every guide is written by someone who actually knows the place. No shortcuts, no copied text, no inflated promises.
Why Lo Peix exists
Opening the apartment was my wife's idea. We had the flat, we had the story, and we wanted other people to discover La Ràpita the way I know it — not the postcard, but the harbour at 6 a.m., Wednesday market, the endless sunsets at Trabucador, the restaurants where the local prawn has been cooked the same way for a hundred years. Lo Peix is an apartment with a blog attached. And behind the blog, a family who is actually from here.
If you're coming, write to me directly
When you book Lo Peix you're not dealing with a faceless platform — you're dealing with me. Any question about La Ràpita, the apartment or how to plan the trip, just drop me a line.