GRAN HOTEL MIRAMAR
Location: Málaga
Author: José Seguí Pérez. Architect
ESTUDIO SEGUÍ
Date: 2014
Order: Hoteles Santos
Surface Area: 19.179 m2
The Hotel Miramar, designed by the architect Fernando Guerrero Strachan in 1921, was inaugurated in 1926 by King Alfonso XXIII. It was originally called the Hotel Príncipe de Asturias, located on a 13,684 m2 plot of land adjoining La Malagueta neighbourhood to the east of the city’s historic centre and facing the Mediterranean Sea. The building has a total built surface area of 19,179 m2, distributed over six floors and a basement which opens up from the unevenness of the site to its maritime façade, with its eaves and roofs with vitrified tiles which create gradations in height within the volumetric play of the project’s regionalist architecture.
The building is structured around a main courtyard of quadrangular geometry, which, in the form of a hall, is articulated with a distribution gallery on the first floor with the main rooms. From this floor the patio is covered by a zenithal stained-glass window, which, like the rest of the building, is made with an interesting metal structure made in the ovens of La Misericordia during the city’s industrial period in the 19th century. The painter Enrique Jaraba and the sculptor Manuel Castaño also collaborated in the ornamentation of the courtyard, who did all the decoration of the interior stonework.
After passing through various historical situations, such as its use as a hospital during the Spanish Civil War in 1936 or its subsequent opening as a hotel in 1940 and the headquarters of the Palace of Justice in 1987, it was transferred to the Andalusian Regional Government’s Ministry of Finance, which organised a public tender in 2008 for its award and reopening of the building as a top-of-the-range hotel, as it was originally conceived. The competition was awarded to the hotel company Hotels Santos according to the Estudio Seguí project, which they jointly developed, recovering the important hotel use of the building for the city. The new Gran Hotel Miramar was inaugurated in February 2017, being awarded with the International Award “Best Luxury Hotel 2018” as the best Luxury Hotel in Spain.
The new Gran Hotel Miramar recovers an important part of the history of the city and its great events, rehabilitating its façade orders and elements of its interesting metallic structure, both very damaged by the previous abandonment of the building, as well as its magnificent lounges recovering original designs and paintings, the differentiated treatment of its rooms, the interpretation of its central polychrome glass dome integrating it with the perimeter gallery on the first floor, the treatment of the silk-white colour of its modernist façade with its ceramic floral and “trencadís” elements, the integration of the facilities that an establishment of this category required, the replacement of vegetation in its historic gardens, and in short the recreation of its entire historic past reinterpreted from a vision of the present for an exceptional offer for the future. It took several years of intense joint work, both business and technical, since the works began in October 2014 and were completed in December 2016, giving back to the city what was its best historical reference for tourism in Malaga.