Sleeping in “the chocolate hotel”, the popular name given to the Hotel de Mar Gran Meliá, a luxury resort built in a private cove in Illetas (Mallorca), means sleeping where you were staying, always in the same suite, the Baron Philippe de Rothschild, whose beach had to be cleaned of urchins every time he wanted to take a bath.
The Mar hotel is the work of the Catalan architect José Antonio Coderch (1913-1984), author, among other works, of the Caixa towers and the Transatlantic Bank building, both in Barcelona. Coderch was not going through its best moment when it was offered this project in Mallorca, a job that coincided in time with the expansion of the Formentor Hotel. Coderch, grateful for his sudden good fortune, dedicated himself to designing an architectural jewel open to the Mediterranean that would be remembered for many years.
The Mar hotel was inaugurated in 1962 by Manuel Fraga, then Franco's tourism minister, and was hotel number 1,000 in the Balearic Islands.
Today it is a luxury establishment for adults only. It exudes luxury and history everywhere, but also silence, peace and serenity. You don't have to get solemn to sleep in an architectural gem but the modernity of the hotel is imposing, it is impossible to ignore the Coderch energy that runs through the building. To protect the privacy of a clientele that he already imagined was demanding, Coderch devised vertical wooden parasols that still protect the terraces of its 137 rooms, all with views of the Mediterranean, from strange glances.
The nickname chocolate hotel, which the residents of Illetas gave it almost immediately, is due to the rectangular tiles with the shape and color of a chocolate bar that today continue to cover the façade of the hotel, and that have survived all the renovations. Despite all the prestige and recognition that he achieved with this hotel, Coderch never liked it, he even went so far as to say that it was his “worst work.”
Only this hotel and Formentor managed to escape “Balearicization” in the sixties, and cultivate elitist tourism where privacy, excellence of service and location in virgin and secret places ruled. “Build without destroying” was the architect's maxim.
In 1961, a year before Coderch completed the Hotel de Mar, he met, in Madrid, César Manrique (1919-1992) and the architect Fernando Higueras (1930-2008) and they became inseparable. Higueras was then working with Antonio Miró. In 1963 he was commissioned to carry out an urban planning study in the south of Lanzarote, and as he was already a friend of Manrique, a native of the island, he traveled with him.
"César Manrique had spoken to me passionately about his towns, the color of the land and its people, but reality surpassed everything I had imagined," Higueras would write years later. These were the years when tourism was already devastating some areas of southern Spain, Higueras and Manrique promised each other that it would not happen in Lanzarote. “That was when they decided not to intervene in the landscape,” explains Lola Botia, in charge of the Fernando Higueras Foundation. “Thanks to that magnificent tandem, Lanzarote is where it is.”
With that spirit, Fernando Higueras designed the Salinas Hotel, which took almost five years to build, from 1973 to 1977. “It is an unrepeatable hotel, we are not going to have another like it. More than a hotel, it is a work of art, one of the best buildings in Spain, compared to the Sydney Opera House or the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao,” says Álvaro Sanz, architect in charge of the latest renovation that was completed this summer.
For the hotel in Lanzarote, Higueras had repeated his magic formula: white concrete, vegetation and openness to nature through the terraces. A concept of air conditioning so revolutionary that it seems designed in our days of climate change. “Everything works with natural ventilation, there is only air conditioning in the noble areas,” confirms Sanz. Rules that the architect strictly applied also in his house in Madrid, excavated seven meters underground.
Originally the hotel, today it is called Paradisus Salinas Lanzarote and is for adults only, was designed to be a four-star hotel, but as the work progressed it was decided to upgrade it to a higher category.
White concrete makes up 90% of its structure and forms a succession of geometric shapes, stepped terraces and skylights. César Manrique was in charge of the execution of various interior murals, the design of the pool and the interior and exterior gardening. The hotel received the national architecture award in 1979.
Since this summer you can sleep in this hotel-museum that combines the rationalist architecture of Fernando Higueras with the murals and gardens of César Manrique. The hotel, owned by Meliá, opens as a Paradisus and is committed to the destination inclusive concept, a modality that transcends the hotel to fully immerse the traveler in the landscapes of Lanzarote, and transform their getaway into a reunion with freedom.
