Marbella, Málaga
The Hotel Don Carlos is one of the studio's most significant hotel projects. Commissioned in 1963 and inaugurated on 20 March 1969 — originally as the Elviria Hilton, inaugurated personally by Conrad Hilton himself — the hotel became from the moment of its opening synonymous with the international glamour that defined Marbella's image for decades.
The project, of notable scale, required the confident resolution of the complexities inherent in a grand hotel: the articulation of the 14-storey tower with the existing horizontal blocks, the relationship of the whole with the 40,000 m² of tropical gardens down to the beach, and the definition of an architectural image capable of conveying distinction and permanence. The tower, with 9 rooms per floor and suites on the top level, became a recognisable landmark in the Marbella coastal landscape.
The project approaches the scale of the grand hotel from a position that avoids both the frivolity of a mere tourist showcase and the functional antisepsis of functionalism. The facade, carefully composed in its arrangement of openings and solids, establishes a dialogue between the urban scale of the ensemble and the human scale of the guest. The treatment of the volumes seeks to break down the mass of the building into legible parts, avoiding the monotony that tends to afflict large-footprint programmes.
The floor plans document the careful interior organisation: the distribution of rooms, the strategic placement of public and service spaces, and the circulation logic that allows the establishment to operate with the fluency demanded by high-end hospitality. The Don Carlos was built at a time when Marbella was consolidating its position as a reference destination in European tourism, and the project captures that ambition.
