My bruises have bruises. I'm blaming the cheerleading. Review writing is a whole lot less dangerous....
My bruises have bruises. I'm blaming the cheerleading. Review writing is a whole lot less dangerous.
Member since:08.07.2001
Reviews:594
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We didn't have the best start at this hotel. After a 3.30am awakening and a 6.30am flight, we arrived there just gone noon Spanish time to discover out room wasn't ready. About 6 other parties were checking in with us, as we were on a package, and all their rooms were ready. Hmpf. So, we went off, found a bar and had some drinks, found the beach and had a nosy, and returned an hour later to find that this time we could check in. A mere 30 minutes later, stripped off and sun lotioned up, all was forgotten as we lay by the pool in the blazing sunshine and began two weeks of doing very little.
We booked this hotel for a few reasons. We wanted to go to a properly Spanish bit of Spain, so we chose the Costa Almería. There aren't many resorts there, so we chose Roquettas de Mar as the one that sounded as if there was the most going on. And then we chose this hotel from the small selection on offer because it, um, appeared to have the largest swimming pool. ¿ Por qué no?
We had booked a standard twin room, which looked pretty much like the picture in the brochure, though we didn't have the sofa they showed (sofa rooms appeared to sleep 3 or 4 people, while there were only two of us). We had a wardrobe with lots of storage, and a table and two chairs, but not a lot else in the room. Not having paid the £80 or so extra for a sea view for our fortnight, our balcony overlooked the street behind with some shops, cafés and apartment blocks. The bathroom had his-and-hers sinks (hers-and-hers in our case), a clean but stained bath with shower, a toilet that didn't believe in power flushing and a bidet that got used only as a dumping ground for that day's bikinis. Pretty much your standard resort-hotel set up. The room was cleaned well on a daily basis with towels changed daily and sheets a couple of times a week.
We were on the 3rd of 5 floors, and these were served by 3 lifts though one of these was temperamental and out of order for about half of our stay. 3 floors is not many, so we walked these most of the times, but I felt sorry for the many, many families with pushchairs. Ground floor rooms did not seem to be available in our hotel, though I think the Park next door had some.
We stayed at the Zoraida Garden and it shared facilities with its sister the Zoraida Park, with a lagoon pool separating the two. There was a further pool over at the Park but this was boring and ordinary shaped, so most people favoured the lagoon instead. Out of peak season there is also an indoor pool on offer, though this was drained during our August stay. Our main purpose for booking this holiday was some rest and relaxation in the sun, so we spent
most of our days by the pools. Sunbeds were your usual package holiday nightmare, but this hotel actually had a rule permitting the reservation of these with towels, though only from 7am until 8pm. Thus, at about 7.05 each morning there was a flurry of people crawling out of bed to go down and bag the best spots. I know because I was one of these on several occasions, being an early riser, and worrying about the postural implications of lying on grass instead now I have reached such an advanced age (I turned 25 while we were there, and y'know, it's just a steep downward slope from here to 50). Most days we got good sunbeds, and I did not feel bad about reserving these as I was only nabbing two, and we were always out there lying on them by 9am, which is more than can be said for various other families who would not turn up until after lunch, if at all. On one momentous occasion I saw a woman reserving 9 beds in one go, only for them to go unoccupied for most of the day. It didn't seem right to us, but it's just one of those things you have to put up with.
The hotel offers full board and all inclusive, but we opted for the standard half board option. This included buffets for breakfast and evening meal which were always ok if not spectacular. Breakfast included "English style" fry ups and "German style" cold meats and cheeses, but it was only the Spanish items such as churros that actually represented the foods you would find elsewhere in the country in question. There was a good choice, though, with 4 or 5 types of bread and rolls, 6 or 7 jams, at least 4 types of cakes and croissants, and 4 cereals each day - they did try. Finding things you liked was a bit of a process of trial and error, though. The cornflakes were iffy but the other cereals were proper Kelloggs, for example. The fruit juice was coloured sugary water, and even the cold water was tainted by this flavour as it came out of the same machine, but the other drinks were fine.
Evening meals were the same, with good choice but some dubious items. Each day there was pizza or pasta for either lunch or dinner (sometimes both) and various meat and fish options. There were lots of breads and salads, and sometimes veg and sometimes chips, but not always. The pudding choices were fab though, with pastries, cakes, ice cream and cookies. Because most people were having lunch as well, sometimes it seemed the dinners did repeat themselves a bit, but I suppose there are only so many main courses they can offer, and doing 6 per day they will soon run out of new ones. (Pasta / pizza counted as starters here, and the main courses were always meat or fish based). Drinks are not included unless you are all inclusive and not all are all that cheap - a litre bottle of water is only €1.80 but the fizzy drinks were more than that for each 200ml bottle. A better bet was to go to the supermarket next door where you could get 1.5 litre bottles of water for 40c and 330ml cans of drink for 60c, though of course you couldn't take these into the dining room for you. The rooms didn't have minibars or fridges but we found the air con units did a fine job of keeping fruit juice and chocolate bars nicely chilled…
Being a "resort" made up of two hotels, this place offered "entertainment" though I use the term loosely. This included such excitement as tennis matches (who wants to play in 35C heat?), mini golf and aqua aerobics which was alarmingly popular - at 12.30pm every day (11.30am on a Sunday) the lagoon pool would fill up with a good 30+ people who would splash around to the same two CDs on constant loop as one of the "entertainers" took them through their paces. I have never seen anything so random in my entire life - that many people, women AND men, young and old, converging on a small area of the pool all so they could tilt their heads up and down and circle their shoulders round and round, then pleased with the exercise they had done, could pat themselves on the back (figuratively - the sessions didn't come close to this level of stretching).
Evening "entertainment" was equally, um, interesting. Most nights we skipped it, what with it not starting until after 10pm each night, and me needing my beauty sleep pre-lounger-reservation dash in the morning, but we did go to a couple of the shows they put on, and laughed hysterically all the way through. These were, incidentally, not supposed to be comedies. The entertainers tried hard but with a clear lack of dance or singing training, some appalling stage management, dubious costumes (one girl wore a swimming costume at one point in place of a leotard) and some language barriers (¿Este coche es automático, si?) it was hardly what you would call a professional show, and you ended up feeling quite sorry for them. However at this stage in the season, nothing excuses a 2 minute number followed by a 5 minute "talk amongst yourselves" wait for the next one while they get ready, so I was not that sympathetic.
The highlight for us, entertainment-wise,
Pictures of Zoraida Garden, Roquetas de Mar
Hotel and pool
was nothing on the daily schedule put up in the lobby - it was the small fire we had on our penultimate day. Having seen a lot of Sky News (see below) we knew all about the goings on back home, and had already scoured the place for wooden fire escapes and other useful features. The lack of these, however, did nothing to prevent one afternoon's rather fun blaze in an individual room, however, set off by a Spaniard smoking in bed. We found later that although it looked quite good from the poolside (the balcony walls turned black, there was billowing smoke) it was put out quite quickly by an enterprising hotel fire officer using the shower head in the bathroom. We also had a mild earthquake one morning, which we initially thought was just one of the All Inclusive families lumbering in to breakfast, until the Spanish news channel told us otherwise later that day.
The entertainment not being up to much, we watched a lot of TV in the evenings. I am now more up to speed on British news than I ever am when at home thanks to Sky News, MSNBC and BBC World being the only English channels on offer. I also improved my German, if not my Spanish, in these two weeks by watching various shows on Pro7, Vox and Sat1 because even dubious German soaps sometime beat yet another update on the stock market.
The hotel's location, right on the beach, was as the brochures described, however although they also mention the 2km trek to the resort centre, they somehow fail to tell you that there is nothing along this route - no shops, bars, restaurants (except for 3 beach places that smelt too fishy for a vegetarian and a low-fish eater). 2km somehow seems longer when it's just an empty stretch of promenade. The resort centre, when you get there, is also not all that attractive, so we didn't venture there very often. In the other direction from the hotel were the old fort, harbour and shopping centre of Roquettas. We were lucky in this respect as, compared to resort centre hotels, these were within walking distance for us, and so we went exploring several evenings. The bus to Almería, some 45 minutes away, also stops right outside the hotel.
Other facilities:
A gym - looked ok, but cost €5 a go except for AI guests which was too much when I didn't really want to work out on my holiday anyway. It was usually empty too - most of the AI guests, being the ones who, judging by their girth, needed it most, couldn't bear to drag themselves away from the endless plates of chips long enough to get on a treadmill.
A disco - looked, well, like a small dark room in the basement of the hotel. We never went.
Various bars serving drinks and snacks, both indoors and by the pool. Frequented mainly by the AI guests for obvious reasons.
A games room, pool tables and some internet terminals that were reasonably quick and cost €1 / 15 minutes.
A kids club of sorts - seemed mainly to revolve around colouring in and the odd game of giant Jenga.
Things I thought the hotel lacked:
I would have liked a music channel, in whatever language, but MTV and friends were conspicuously absent, as was any form on in room music or radio, meaning we adopted the antisocial behaviour of listening to our own ipods.
I would also have liked Nutella or even cheapo-chocolate-spread at breakfast, but I know that's just being a little fussy.I don't know what I expected guest-wise, but there seemed an odd mixture here. It is popular with Spaniards who flock from the north in their hundreds at this time of year, and include both families and rowdy groups of 20 somethings who seemed especially keen dive-bombing into the pool right in front of wherever we happened to be sitting that day. There were some Germans and the odd Dutch family, but the second largest group after Spaniards was the English which we had not expected based on other reviews we'd read before booking. The Brits-abroad provided us with most though not all of the colourful characters for gossiping about in the dining room - there were the spider family, the fatty fatty bum bums (an unbelievably obese extended family who fed their 18 month old non-stop bottles of coke and would not have been fun to sit next to on a plane), Grandad (an elderly gentleman who would be waiting outside the dining room for half an hour before each meal), the bouffant lady with the mad clothes (who evidently lived in the hotel and could in fact have been the manager). Out of season this hotel is popular with pensioner types, but in August as with anywhere in Spain, it's families with children who are the main influx.
We booked this holiday in February 2007, travelled in August with Direct Holidays and paid £550 each for two weeks half board, including flights, transfers and supplements for deigning to travel from a non-London airport. We had outstanding weather but I would not choose to return, even at that price. We had a pleasant holiday, but nothing more.
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Set overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, on the edge of the town of Roquetes de Mar, this ... more
large resort covers 3.5 hectares of prime beachfront land. Composed of 2 hotel buildings surrounded by lush gardens, the resort features a range of facilities to he...
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