Kenny E
Google
I'm a regular trip advisor contributor but for reasons of speed and because finding a place where wanted when we wanted was short, we booked this on sight and after reading a few reviews on booking.com where we made the booking. Why oh why did I not check here first? Biggest mistake of our trip. Thankfully it was only for one night and in the end for just a few hours but here are my findings.||||The hotel is situated on one of the main roads in Tarifa, so it's congested, busy and all you want to do is get to the room, secure your belongings and hit the beach. Forget parking, they only have spaces for about the first 15 guests with a capacity for well over 100. You'll no doubt spend almost an hour trying to find a space within walking distance and don't expect a guarantee to be able to get your car out next day. Boxing people in is a Spanish pastime... We went in and it immediately looked a bit run down and seedy. Old style Spanish decor but clean enough. A sign sent us across the way to the Hostal where we walked into a pristine marble reception area air conditioned and friendly staff. I speak Spanish so checking in wasn't a problem but it may have been had I not as the lady didn't speak English. We were given our key and went back across the road to the 'pension' and left the Hostal behind and I couldn't help but feel it was the wrong way round and the Hostal was nice and the place we were going to was the 1 star accommodation. I was right in every way.||||We went upstairs and as we proceeded into the place it was clearly a backpackers hotel. All very basic, shared bathrooms etc. We found our room and opened the door. 3 beds sandwiched into the room with about a foot of space around them, maybe a bit more at the door end where there was a sink that was barely attached to the wall. My Heart Sank. I quickly glanced about and saw that there was no air conditioning, not only that but no vents or any hint of ventilation of any kind. There was a window but in my experience you keep those shut at night if you want to sleep because of the noise and in such a country they generally just let in more hot air. It had been almost 40 degrees each day that week and at that point it was already well into the high 30s in that room...no problem I said, we'll go out, have some food and come back late just to sleep and carry on our way in the morning. So we did that and rolled back up at Pension Facunda at just after midnight. The place was quite noisy even though there was a notice saying silence after 11pm. Funny, since outside the town was in full swing and would be for a good 3 or more hours yet. The heat hit us like a brick wall, we walked in from the fresh Tarifa night air, cooled by the strong winds there, into absolute hell, a word I will no doubt use again in this piece. Some lovely guest had used the toilet which I was heading for and left a stench that was nothing short of evil. No toilet paper down the WC so the remnants of his or her cleanup operation were sitting proud on top of a bin full up and festering with similar human waste. Even the blue-bottles circling the bin were gagging on this mess I'm sure. On top of that some clearly insane guest had had a hot shower so what with being unable to breathe because of the faecal matter present in the room, whatever air I was able to grab was hot and humid. It's up there with the worst experiences of my life and I'm no spring chicken. The floor was wet with I don't know what so I made the visit as brief as possible and joined my family in oven number 8, a couple of doors down. There were 4 youngsters next door making noise, giggling and sharing stories with the door open and rather than pick a fight I just went into our room. So, we undressed, laid on the clean beds which was somewhat a relief and proceeded to sweat profusely as the oppressive heat of the night grabbed us all by the throats. 2 hours in and I wondered what I had done in a previous life to deserve this. Maybe I had tortured some poor soul and so offered up some remorseful thoughts in a vain attempt to get a breeze to possibly blow through the small window which was enclosed in a courtyard. It never came. The noise continued, crashes, bangs, laughing and the processional flow of full bladdered drunk youths to the toilet seemed never ending. Then at 2:30 in the morning the room filled with light. Someone in the next room across the courtyard had come home with a friend, drunk and giggling. They had used the bathroom or other facility and left the light on which was now illuminating our oven. Reluctantly I decided to pull down the Persiana, the roller blind type affair that stops sunlight heating up the room in the day. No surprise to find it was busted. I lay there for a bit longer listening to the young couple begin to engage in heavy petting and decided to head down to 1 of the 2 vending machines for a cooling drink, if only to place the can on my forehead. I got dressed and pumped in 4 Euros before I read with bleary eyes that the machine was 'needing a service'. Their loss, I would have happily emptied the machine and made a mattress of cold cans of drink for the promise of sleep.||||The other machine was of course busted too. I nearly made the mistake of using the toilet on the way back upstairs without shoes. The floor by this time was awash with urine diluted beer and spirits and possibly pieces of chunder but it was impossible to tell in the dank light of the room. I returned to see my wife quite literally drenched in sweat, her night clothes wet and clinging to her body. In any other circumstances it might have been an amazing sight but her face told another story. Nearly 3 am and not a wink of sleep. Well, we have free wifi, I'll hook up and browse a little to take my mind off the misery. I got the code from our booking documents, found the router, here we go: "access stops at 11pm." Why? Why would you do that? I'm not a child who needs internet policing! Across the courtyard things had gone up another gear and the headboard was now banging against the wall with grunts and whimpers from the couple concerned. Enough was enough, it was time to leave. I woke our young son and we quickly packed and headed back over to the lovely air conditioned reception and remained calm whilst asking for our deposit back and to check out. The chap seemed a bit bemused but I told him conditions across the road were intolerable for anyone but a drunk Spanish 17 year old or anyone else sufficiently intoxicated and accustomed to the situation in Pension Facunda at the height of a blistering Iberian summer, the worst for 50 years.||||We walked, resigned, back to the car where we drove a few miles down the road parked on the beach and slept in the car where we immediately drifted off into a fitful sleep in the cool westerly breeze coming off of the sea. Whilst we were checking out a number of drunk couples came in enquired about a room and it became apparent it was as much of a 'knocking shop' as a hostal. A place to fornicate in privacy and not be bothered by rampant feral dogs wandering the beach at night. In the morning we had breakfast at a cafe where we were able to use the facilities and grab a shower on the beach. We then headed off and had a fun day on the golden sands at Bolonia just along the coast from Tarifa.||||To be fair we knew this place was bargain basement, however not how low this basement was in terms of anything that resembled something they could actually charge for. Yes it was clean, yes the staff were friendly but it stopped right there. The rooms in the publicity pictures, whilst they may exist, bore no resemblance to our one. It was nasty, small and generally run down. Everything you'd expect from being used and abused by a non stop flow of backpackers. Noisy, heat beyond belief and smelly. Why such a place doesn't have air conditioning is beyond me, even a ceiling fan would have helped but to have nothing at temperatures approaching 35 degrees at night is tortuous. I'm not even going to bother pursuing a refund. I'm going to chalk it up to experience and realise that Tarifa is not the place to expect even what you may take for granted at a Premier Inn or similar here in the UK. It just doesn't exist there. The town itself is pretty grotty in many respects. Rubbish everywhere as you come to expect in Spain- guess what? The rubbish fairy still hasn't taken away the beer bottle you threw down that alley 2 years ago dude!- pile after pile of sun baked dog faeces embellishes every stretch of pavement you encounter and it's only a matter of time before you find someone's dog-end graveyard whilst you fill your bucket with sand on the beach. It's a surfers paradise but not somewhere that even compares with Torre Del Mar or Cádiz where they strive to keep the place immaculate day and night. The real killer? This place was £100 a night. Avoid, unless you get off on a place that does its best to recreate hell on earth and does so most admirably.
