Hostal Oporto, Madrid

Advantages: Lively, great for culture, food, shopping
Disadvantages: Extremes of temperatures, can be noisy all night

...Madrid is one of those cities, like Brasilia or Islamabad, which were invented for political reasons, rather than springing up organically because it had a natural harbour, or was on a confluence of rivers, or a fertile plain. It shouldn't really exist, perched as it is deep in the dusty interior of Spain, intolerably hot at the height of summer, and often bitterly cold in winter. It's the artificial capital of a maritime nation, a seafood loving nation, stranded as far from the sea as is possible on the Iberian peninsula. Yet despite everything, including the still recent dull, soul sapping Francoist interregnum, Madrid is a thrilling city to visit, with something for everyone (except beach lovers, obviously). It's possible to stay cheaply in Madrid in one of the many hostales lurking in places like Fuencarral off the Gran Via... Read review

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Advantages: Decent Cheap accomidation, Rooms are good enough for what we need, Nice View From The Window, Cheap
Disadvantages: No Taxi Drivers have any idea where it actually is, The description of The rooms when we booked.

...As I'm sure some of you will be aware, I was in Barcelona for a long weekend to celebrate my 21st birthday, well one of the most important things, after booking your flights is finding a place to stay. And as one of the guys we were going with is at Uni, we needed to find something reasonable but cheap for the 4 nights we would be staying there. Well that's where the Hostal Lami comes in. Not exactly a Hostel more of a cheap hotel a bit like our Travel Lodge. Booking & Pricing *************** Obviously when we decided to go to Barcelona a couple of months ago we needed a decent place to stay so by chance having bought the flights through Opodo.co.uk there was a small advert for a hotel at just €38. That works out at roughly £25 a night, which when you consider hotels right in the centre were about €138 a night that... Read review

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Advantages: central
Disadvantages: rude staff, noisy and small rooms

...we booked together with two other family members a 4 night stay at this hotel, hostel, or as it's called in Spain; hostal. The hotel is 2 star.., one too many if you ask me. There were problems with checkin in, they claimed one of us did not have a booking and before giving us the benefit of the doubt, we were the ones who were wrong.., luckily we had the printout of the booking, made DIRECT with the hotel, on their web-site. Ah.., no excuses. The room we first had was extremely noisy; the street on one side and the communial room on the other. Next day we ASKED(not demaded!) to change one of the rooms to another as it was too noisy. What happened next was truly unbelievable.. The manager shouting, extremely rude and told us we should be lucky we had a room, we should respect his(!) country etc etc. Unbelievable. We travel quite a lot... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful