La Lomita del Chingolo

The bathrooms are cramped, but otherwise it’s a nice B&B style place.

This place is closed for good.

We arrived to find what looked like an abandoned house, with a host there. He showed us to the room, up a corridor that was closed off by a door at the entrance to the stairs. The room had old furniture, a broken air conditioner, a moldy smell, and was filthy. There was a used roll of toilet paper in the bathroom, no bath towels, and very little light. Honestly, it looked like a house from a horror movie. It’s far from everything: not near the center, the beach, or tourist sights. They charged the same as hotels with good facilities, a good location, breakfast, a pool, and beach service. There were just two of us staying there, with no other guests. The host was intrusive and gave us no privacy. When we went out, he asked what time we’d be back. When we returned, he shouted up from the bottom of the stairs asking if we were okay and whether we’d found the place. He got into everything, and there was also a cat wandering around the room. He kept the keys to the accommodation. We decided to leave because we were genuinely afraid something might happen to us at night. He had the room key, we were the only people there, the place was on a dark, deserted street with few neighbors and nothing nearby, and he closed off the stairs to the room at night. We would have been trapped and isolated. We arrived at 17:43 and left at 21:00. We were pressured and made to pay the full amount even though we hadn’t used anything. We paid in euros, then ten days later he charged the same amount to my card again, and I’m now dealing with Booking, which has already removed this place. Check the other reviews and don’t fall for this. The place was horrible in every way. We were misled, and it was nothing like the website description or the reviews. If you want to throw away your money and go through what we did, stay here. I’ve stayed in hostels in Santiago, Miami, and São Paulo, but nothing like this has happened to me before. It’s awful that a place like this was listed on Booking. This is just my personal experience. We paid the full U$160.00, the same price as the hotel we moved to, Hotel San Marco. That hotel had a pool, a good location, room service, breakfast, towels, beach service, and freedom. Even after we’d paid in cash, the host came after us in the street as we were leaving and tried to start an argument. He kept asking why we were going and said he found it strange, suggesting we had a problem with him. We just wanted to leave. He even said he knew the place wasn’t up to the standard of the hotel we’d chosen. If he knew it was so much worse and dirty, why charge the same as real hotels, especially when he later billed us again for something we’d paid? I don’t understand.

The place is isolated and far from everything, and there’s no privacy. The bathroom is tiny, and breakfast was awful. It’s basically a house where people live, with the back used as a kind of camping area, and there are cats around. The atmosphere felt bad. The owner of the house made breakfast: two slices of sandwich bread, one piece of fruit, and coffee with milk or juice. The host took us behind the house and showed us a marijuana plant. Good grief. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone, not even an enemy. We booked through Booking, which thankfully no longer partners with this horror-movie house.