Pousada EntreMares

The location is excellent, and breakfast was varied and delicious. Cleaning was disappointing, though: they cleaned the bathroom but didn't disinfect it, and they didn't mop the floor. They changed towels only every two days.

Praia Grande is around 600 meters away, and the main street has shops and restaurants. Across the street, there’s a self-service laundromat, where washing and drying cost 46 Rs. I also recommend "Bom Paladar" on the way to the beach. It sells food by weight and offers coffee and cake in the afternoon. The room had a microwave and an electric kettle for mate, and guests can eat in the common areas. The staff were always ready to help, each in their own way. Breakfast was good, though the 7 to 9 am window was too early. Longer hours might also ease the shortage of chairs, and more kinds of fruit would be welcome. We stayed 18 days across three rooms. Rooms 108, a double, and 101, a triple, are the ones I’d recommend. The rooms are small and some have no ventilation, while others have windows facing shared areas, making it harder to live together. Furnishings are sparse, and a little table or shelf with a lamp beside the bed would help. There’s only a mini-fridge for storage. There are serious maintenance issues. They were repairing the roof during Carnival, which meant workers had to enter rooms or guests had to move. That kind of work would be better done in the off-season. The maintenance man is a genius, but he has a lot of problems to deal with. Cleaning needs attention too: the helpful staff could use hotel management training to prepare rooms properly, and the common areas need cleaning more often, perhaps because the inn is short on time. Wi-Fi was weak or intermittent. And please water the plants, the orchids in the lobby are dying! 😢

After a few days, they had sold more parking spaces than they could accommodate, so we had nowhere to leave the car. When we complained at reception, we were met with hostility and no solution. Even on arrival, before we had managed to park, they charged us separately for parking on top of the room rate. The rooms had poor ventilation, no place for clothes, damp sheets that smelled bad, and no working hot water. Breakfast was also disappointing, with little variety and never enough chairs. The whole experience was extremely unpleasant.

We were close to Praia Grande, though the place itself was simple and a bit dirty. Breakfast was very meager, and there were no sheets for us on the night we arrived. The center of Arraial is about 10 blocks away.