30.05.17 — Travel

Abandoned Portugal

So, and probably way too long ago for anybody to remember, I wrote a blog post about a holiday to the southern coast of Portugal with my family. Within said post I mentioned how I’d been exploring at an abandoned hotel as part of my trip, promising to post them in a follow-up blog entry – then in the whirlwind which was my year working in Madrid I completely forgot to write any such blog post! I’ve done all the scanning now though, and present them here only two years late…

Approaching the hotel

Down in Lagos, which is a town near Faro on the southern coast of Portugal, there’s a huge hotel which has laid abandoned for over 15 years. One afternoon me and my dad headed out to see how far we could get inside before things got too dangerous or difficult…

Approaching from behind

We approached from behind the “Hotel Golfinho”, skirting around the old swimming pool structure and vaulting over a few walls to enter the grassy area surrounding another abandoned building at the rear, seen in the photo above with the sloping roof.

A strange painting

After finding some strange objects scattered around the place, including the above painting, a pile of animal bones, the carcasses of some fish, and the remnants of campfires, we headed further into the complex and were confronted by a barbed wire fence.

An off-putting sight

Not to be fazed, I did a bit of snooping around and eventually found a break in the fence, through which I hesitantly clambered in order to avoid putting any weight on a very fragile-looking roof which lay beyond. I soon found myself in the outdoor swimming pool area of the hotel, where the years of neglect have not been kind to the structure.

Crumbling poolside walls
A harsh contrast
Debris fills a smaller pool
The cocktail bar has long run dry

I wanted to push ahead and try to enter the main labyrinth of the huge structure itself, but the fragile plastic roof of the buildings at the rear which I’d have had to climb over seems a little too risky given we weren’t supposed to be there in the first place. Not finding any entrance points to the front of the building, we decided to call it a day, but not before I managed to sneak a few more snaps in as we retreated.

Looking skyward
Long dried out

It was interesting to witness first hand the downfall of something which would have at once seemed so huge and immovable as a seven-storey hotel, and eerie to think that the scene of so much fun and relaxation has now wound up so dangerous and dirty. For more information be sure to search for Hotel Golfinho Lagos online – others have managed to get into the corridors and rooms of the place!

That’s all for this post, but I should also tease that I did actually take my old Praktica TL1000 35mm film camera with me to Lagos too, the developed images of which I’ve just unearthed once again. I’ll be sure to get those scanned in and posted here as soon as possible – hey, maybe even sooner than two years late… Oops.