Castelar Novo Hotel

In over 15 years of traveling around Brazil, I’ve never stayed in a worse hotel. The air conditioning didn’t work, there wasn’t another room available, and we were still charged for a room with air conditioning. The facilities are old and there are no outlets in the room. There was hardly anything for breakfast. I wouldn’t recommend it.

The air conditioning worked well, and the room itself was okay, but the bathroom soap holder had a tiny used bar of soap in it. That grossed me out a bit. The holder was rusty and caked with residue from lots of soaps. At breakfast, the butter and margarine came in shared tubs. It was a poor stay and I wouldn’t come back, though it’s manageable for one night.

The bed was comfortable, with clean sheets and a good pillow. The staff were helpful and took initiative, and you could tell the place had been cleaned. But the maintenance was awful. The hotel was literally falling apart: a brick propped up one leg of the wardrobe, the toilet seat was broken and very old, and cockroaches were crawling up the walls. At breakfast, everyone used the same knife in the shared tubs of requeijão and margarine. For a place called Terra do Queijo, there wasn’t even any queijo minas. I do not recommend it.

I never even stayed there. I was going to book a room for my husband, but the price shown on the website was different from the one quoted in person. That’s misleading advertising.