Marbella, Málaga
The Hotel Don Miguel, inaugurated in 1973, was at the time the largest hotel establishment in Marbella: 502 rooms and 35 suites distributed across a three-wing block with central vertical circulation, a typological solution that allowed the organisation of a large-scale programme with efficiency while preserving the orientation and views of each accommodation unit.
The project was the responsibility of the studio, which conceived the building from the first sketch as a hotel capable of sitting naturally within the fabric of Marbella whilst offering its guests a distinctly quality stay. The surviving documentation — including a remarkable historic aerial view — allows us to appreciate the implantation of the complex in its original context and the building's relationship with the surrounding volumes of the city at the time of construction.
The Don Miguel marked a turning point in Marbella's hotel landscape: its scale, unprecedented in the city at the time, required the rigorous resolution of both the internal organisation of the programme and the building's presence in the urban landscape. The facade, composed with attention to proportion and to the rhythm of the openings, establishes a dialogue between the scale of the ensemble and the human measure of the guest, avoiding the opacity that so often besets large accommodation blocks.
The historic photographs of the building show a hotel that knew how to respond to its time without abandoning an architecture of lasting ambition. Decades after its construction, the typological and compositional soundness of the original project remains legible in the volume of the building.
