As I was clearing out my room just the other day I stumbled upon the developed film that I got from Portugal, which has been sat in a box for ages but I never got round to scanning! The photos document both the holiday in general and the exploration of the abandoned hotel, and I now present them here only two years late.

The roll of film begins by documenting a wander along the coast, exploring as grutas, the famous grotto formations dotted along the water’s edge. The old Praktica 35mm used to take these photos comes from the 1980s and yields images with a vignette blur but a gorgeously retro feel.

The photos have only been edited very subtly, just to correct fading and colour balance, but they remain largely untouched. This process of taking photos without knowing what you’ve taken is a tonne of fun yet wildly risky, but I find that it’s all worth it when I develop some film which has been sat in my camera for over a year, and in doing so discover photos which I had forgotten that I had taken.

The proceeding photo has to be one of my favourites from the grottos, be sure to click on it to expand and have a nosey. The 35mm film, the old boats and the garish parasols all place the photo in the 70s or 80s, not in August 2015 when it was actually taken.

From there the photos then move to the abandoned hotel, where I feel the old film compliments the eerie subject matter. Tread where you dare.

And for my favourite film snap from my exploration of the hotel, a look over the pool area, where the film medium and the bright sun paint a rather bleak picture of the scene.

For anybody interested, these photos were taken on a partly broken 1980 Pentacon Praktica TL1000 with Kodak ColorPlus 35mm ISO200 film. I say partly broken as the autofocus and ambient light sensors no longer work as it will not accept a battery – so it’s fully manual. If you’ve got any comments or feedback be sure to get in touch – this is still a new world for me!

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…

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.