Hotel Golfinho.
Aug. 2nd, 2015 11:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sister_luckBack when we first on holiday in Lagos in 2007 we stayed in a hotel just above Praia Dona Ana, the most famous of the picturesque rocky beaches of the town. A little further up the road there were building works - a large apartment building had just been finished and they were refurbishing the old hotel next to it. Or so it seemed - they were removing all the furniture and fittings which led to quite a bit of noise, but was fascinating to watch.
In this picture from our last stay you can see the new building and the old one:
While they did what in German we would call entkernen - literally de-core a building, removing its core - I think in English you would 'gut' it? - they never got started on the refurbishment.
In 2013 we returned to Lagos and the famous Hotel Golfinho had lost one of its four stars and acquired some graffiti:
Apparently they had run out of money or into legal difficulties, so the skeleton of the hotel is still there, decaying further and further.
There is a large green metal barrier around it now, which is great for sticking posters to it.
This is the hotel's other side two years ago at night:
It used to be quite the grand hotel, with an underground car park and a large reception area on the ground floor. The rooms are probably small for today's standards.
This year it had lost another star, but the dolphin was still there:
Reflected in the window of the furniture shop around the corner:
This year we were able to see the top of the building every time we stepped out of our hotel room - and the huge lobster graffiti which has replaced the writing that you can see in the night-time picture.
It would take a lot of money (and a lot of ingenuity in planning) to update Hotel Golfinho for today's discerning Algarve travellers who prefer apartments and individuality, but the location is great & I feel the architecture is the attractive kind of brutalist. The biggest problem is its sheer size - it might just be too large and demolition would be very very costly.
In this picture from our last stay you can see the new building and the old one:
While they did what in German we would call entkernen - literally de-core a building, removing its core - I think in English you would 'gut' it? - they never got started on the refurbishment.
In 2013 we returned to Lagos and the famous Hotel Golfinho had lost one of its four stars and acquired some graffiti:
Apparently they had run out of money or into legal difficulties, so the skeleton of the hotel is still there, decaying further and further.
There is a large green metal barrier around it now, which is great for sticking posters to it.
This is the hotel's other side two years ago at night:
It used to be quite the grand hotel, with an underground car park and a large reception area on the ground floor. The rooms are probably small for today's standards.
This year it had lost another star, but the dolphin was still there:
Reflected in the window of the furniture shop around the corner:
This year we were able to see the top of the building every time we stepped out of our hotel room - and the huge lobster graffiti which has replaced the writing that you can see in the night-time picture.
It would take a lot of money (and a lot of ingenuity in planning) to update Hotel Golfinho for today's discerning Algarve travellers who prefer apartments and individuality, but the location is great & I feel the architecture is the attractive kind of brutalist. The biggest problem is its sheer size - it might just be too large and demolition would be very very costly.
