Hostel Sol & Mar

A basic, practical hostel at the top of favela do vidigal, with a fantastic view.

Friendly service and great hospitality, a really great place to stay.

It was okay.

The view from the main lounge is genuinely beautiful, and the location is great. 99 can get there, though Uber can’t, and it’s easy to walk up and down without needing a motorcycle taxi. The volunteers are lovely, but this hostel is far from good. The place feels almost like a shared student house, with staff leaving the main lounge at a certain hour so guests are left on their own. The lounge is the only decent facility, and you can get a similar view anywhere in Vidigal. The rooms have no windows because of how the spaces are laid out. I was in the women’s room, number 6, which smelled of sweaty feet and damp. Four beds were squeezed into the room with no natural ventilation, just a wall fan. There were lots of moths and accumulated cobwebs. I looked at the shared rooms too, and they were much better than the women’s room, but one had a huge mold stain that would have killed me in two days. There are only two bathrooms for all the shared rooms, one with a shower and one without. The shower bathroom had a blocked drain and turned into a little pool on my second day. Water leaked through the hostel. I had to tell them the drain had been blocked for two days and the shower stall was flooded, or I doubt any staff member would have noticed, given the level of maintenance. The second bathroom had no water, so the toilet wouldn’t flush. Both were awful. The kitchen has a fridge and cupboard and is decent, but people don’t follow basic hostel rules. On my first night someone drank most of my soda, about two thirds, and ate three of my friends’ four pizza slices. The rooftop is amazing, but it’s never open, so I don’t understand why they advertise it if guests can’t use it. My checkout was at 8:30 Sunday morning. I set aside my only bag in the hostel lounge after asking a volunteer and being told it was okay. Three hours later Igor started calling and messaging to say I couldn’t leave my things there. I came back from the beach because I refused to put up with a hostel repeatedly calling me to pick up a bag from the lounge. I’ve never seen that happen before, and I think it may have been a made-up rule, since I was the only one bothered about removing my things. Two friends checked out and left their bags right beside mine, but they never got a call or message. I spent the afternoon at the beach with them while my bag was in the sand, and they eventually left at 6 p.m. to collect theirs. So the rule seems to depend on whether they like you, or something like that. I wouldn’t recommend this place to anyone. The stairs are nothing compared with the deplorable condition of the rooms they rent out at a hostel price that includes breakfast.