Best Practice Series — Vol. 05: WeCamp — How a Barcelona Startup Became Spain's Campground Consolidator

While most of Europe's camping sector was still operating like it was 1985 — family-owned, locally managed, underinvested, and underbranded — a group of hospitality executives in Barcelona asked a simple question: what happens when you apply hotel-grade thinking to a campsite?

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The Founding Thesis

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WeCamp was founded in 2020. Its first site was in Santa Cristina d'Aro on the Costa Brava — six hectares, 240 units, acquired in partnership with a local owner. But the founding team — led by Albert Montesinos, a veteran hotelier and co-founder of the design hotel chain Chic & Basic — were not building a campsite. They were building a platform.

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From the beginning, WeCamp operated as a joint venture between its founding team and Meridia Capital, a Barcelona-based alternative investment manager. This structural separation — operator on one side, asset owner on the other — is what allowed WeCamp to scale with a speed that no purely organic outdoor hospitality business could have matched.

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In a sector where no-one owned more than five sites, the opportunity wasn't to build something new. It was to consolidate what already existed — and operate it properly.

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The Consolidation Play

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In Iberia, the camping market was extraordinarily fragmented. No operator owned more than five sites. There was no consolidated glamping platform. No recognisable brand a guest could trust across locations. WeCamp's founding thesis was that this gap represented a market opportunity of significant scale — not by building from scratch, but by acquiring existing sites, repositioning them through design and brand investment, and operating them under a single coherent platform.

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By mid-2024, Meridia had executed twelve acquisitions in partnership with WeCamp. The portfolio crossed into Portugal for the first time, then added two further Portuguese acquisitions totalling 300 units across 21 hectares. By November 2024, a prime beachfront plot in El Palmar de Vejer was acquired for a 59-unit glamping resort with a 2,100 m² beach club, opening 2026. The portfolio now stands at fifteen sites — making Meridia and WeCamp Spain's largest owner and operator of campsites. Every site is Biosphere Certified.

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The Operating Playbook

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What WeCamp applies to each acquired site is the full toolkit of professional hospitality management: centralised revenue management and dynamic pricing, a fully transactional online booking platform, rich data on occupancy and guest demographics, active brand investment, and a consistent experience philosophy. Each site is positioned as a destination in its own right, with a programmatic offer of activities designed around the specific landscape it occupies.

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The conditions that made WeCamp possible in Iberia exist across the continent. The Alps. The Austrian lake district. The Black Forest. The Norwegian fjords. Every one of these landscapes is dotted with underinvested, family-owned campgrounds sitting on extraordinary land. The first mover advantage in European campground consolidation belongs to whoever builds the platform, the brand, and the operational capability first. In Iberia, that was WeCamp. In Germany, Austria, and the wider DACH region, that position is still open.

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WeCamp got there first in Spain and Portugal. The rest of Europe is still waiting.

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