Holidays from Hell

[Marbella]

Has anyone had a bad holiday experience in Spain? In order not to implant too depressing a theme in the forum, it woud be great if each story could end with, "and the moral of the story is...", so I/we can learn from the experience of others.

Here's one I was thinking about this morning for some reason:

Our first trip to Galicia about 5 years ago was to a rural house a few km outside Santiago. The photos of the place looked stunning and my wife spoke to the owner and she was very friendly. On that basis we paid a 50% deposit which for the 2 summer weeks came to about 600 (sterling).

The directions the owner gave us were not good, so we drove for an hour in the rain round in circles until she kindly sent her son out to find us and escort us to the house. All the family turned out to great us, the owner, her 2 sons and their wives, all the children...a really nice bunch they were too.

However, alarm bells started to ring immediately I saw the garden. It was a bit uncared for which we could live with, but there was a broken child's swing and a climbing frame that was just a rusting heap of twisted metal. The swimming pool was up at one end of the garden. The pump was working away but the water was covered with insects hopping across the top of the water. The water was fairly clear but there were some nasty looking brownish patches at the bottom of the pool. The pool ladders were rusty and one was unusable because one of its sides was broken and it was hanging limply, lop-sided in the water. Just a metre from the far end of the pool was the next-door neighbour's stinking chicken coup. OK, I thought, this is bad but with the weather in Galicia the boys might not need the pool and we'll be out and about exploring anyway. Then I went into the house.

The kitchen was musty, it would need a thorough clean. The crockery set was just made up of oddments, ditto the cutlery, no two pieces were the same. The oven and hob had seen better days. The dishwasher was broken. I'm still trying to be positive, I'm thinking, "the food's great in Galicia, we'll eat out".

Bathroom 1 was unusable. The toilet was broken and stomach-churningly stained. There were tiles missing from the wall around the bath and part of the ceiling was broken. Bathroom 2 was a bit dated but usable. The bedrooms were basic but livable, the mattresses I won't go into any further detail here. Enough said.

The sitting, come dining room finished it. It was a large damp room filled with dark wood furniture. In one corner was a little portable TV. Scattered around the floor, in cabinets and on the walls was a massive collection of stuffed animals. A taxidermists dream. There was everything from large cats (not lions/tigers but bigger than domestic cats), dogs, boar, bulls heads, fish and twenty or more birds staring at me with their dead beady eyes. I'm a true carnivore but I couldn't eat or sit and relax in that room.

I admit we took the coward's way out and just locked up the house and put the keys through the letterbox, saying goodbye to our money. My Spanish wasn't good enough to complain in person to the owner and my wife wasn't well enough at the time to get into a debate with them. We put it down to experience and went to stay in a cheap hotel for a night before driving off the next day to the in-laws for some free accommodation.

So, the moral of the story is....when renting holiday homes via the owner 1) beware, photos are not always recent 2) pay as small a deposit as you can get away with.

[Brian]

Marbella,

What a purely revolting experience! I can't imagine such a hovel being advertised as a vacation chalet. :eek:

I haven't had such an experience in Spain, thankfully, but I've certainly stayed in my share of hotels that were a lot less luxurious than advertised.

[viajero]

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;)

[gary]

After a week on the costa brava Gill and I elected to do two days in Barça to finish it off. We picked a budget hostal in the Plaza de Marques de Barbera which is in Raval. The square was usually full of prostitutes ranging from dog ugly to stunningly beautiful, with the added dimension that some of the beautiful ones were men! It was hard not to stare and even odder being subject to the occasional 'Hola guapo' type comment though it wasnt particularly intimidating.

The room was the problem - painted battleship grey it had only a small window which opened into the central well of the building and we were treated to a vociferous row between hooker and pimp i imagine which went on for hours.

Even this was not too bad but the last straw was the bathroom, it was clean enough but the gap between the front of theWC and the wall was about three inches, rendering things difficult to say the least for my wife and downright impossible for me should I wish to be seated!!

There was also a crucifix on the wall that glowed in the dark

More amusing than horrifying......

[kyle]

Hi everybody :-)

this is my first post here in NFS, and being (somewhat) related to the holidays businness here in Spain I couldn't resist to add my 2 cents.

We're having a hellluva of problems with so called "casas rurales". Most of them are unregistered guest houses that won't meet the standards for a comfortable stay. In adittion, in the recent years there have been a number of subsidies to rebuild and repair old rural houses and convert them into this rural houses. The problem is that most people are just using this money to prepare a good, nice house for themselves and trying to pass the government-imposed business obligation as soon as possible and with as little effort as possible too.

Of course, there are also houses advertised as rural houses that are in the middle of towns, near highways and so on :-) . (From what I've seen in the north of Spain, of course)

As a moral, I would do a little bit of research trying to locate the house in government-published list of rural houses (beware of unofficial ads) and getting as many references as possible.

[gary]

Hi everybody :-)

As a moral, I would do a little bit of research trying to locate the house in government-published list of rural houses (beware of unofficial ads) and getting as many references as possible.

great advice Kyle

We would say 'As a rule....' not 'As a moral' in this situation

Welcome to the NFS Forums.....its nice to have an insider!!

[kyle]

thanks for the correction, gary :-)