Today, Meliá Hotels announced an important expansion plan in Cuba.
The Spanish hotel company’s plans include new hotels in three regional cities with historic significance and colonial origins.
Trinidad and Camagüey (two of the first seven villages built in Cuba between 1511 and 1515) and the French, neoclassical city of Cienfuegos, the Pearl of the South, founded in 1819 by 50 families from Bordeaux, New Orleans and Haiti. All three cities have incredible historic centers that have been designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
In these villagess, hotels with high architectural and historical value will be rehabilitated and managed, including the San Carlos, La Unión and El Jagua hotels in Cienfuegos, and the Gran Hotel and Colón in Camagüey, which are an important part of history and life of the cities as well as other palaces, churches and historic squares.
In addition, refurbished buildings built after 1959, such as the Camagüey hotel, located on the grounds of the old manor Villa Angela, 4 kilometers from the center of the Tinajones, and will be built the new and modern Meliá Trinidad, in The beach of María Aguilar, at the beginning of the privileged peninsula of Ancón, only 12 kilometers from the best preserved colonial city of Cuba.
In Cienfuegos, La Unión has with three floors and an inner courtyard with rooms and suites surrounding the courtyard. One room is particularly notable because, on the 15 December of 1985, the then leader of Cuba, General Arsenio Martinez Fields, received the news of the defeat of his Spanish troopsby the General Independente Máximo Gómez.
Other illustrious figures who stayed at La Union include Russian dancer Ana Pavlova (who acted in the neighboring Terry Theater), the chess world champion José Raúl Capablanca, and the intimate collaborator of José Martí Juan Gualberto Gómez.
The Spanish hotel company was one of the first foreign hotel companies to begin operations in Cuba after the island national opened its hotel sector to outsiders in the 1990s. Today, the hotel group manages 29 hotels in Cuba with 12,552 rooms, up from 12,310 rooms in 2014.
The company reported 5.7 million overnight stays in 2015, with an average occupancy of more than 70%. Its Cuba hotel operation is managing hotel assets under contract with local hotels owners, a group of three military-affiliated Cuban entities: Gran Caribe Hotel Group, Gaviota SA Tourism Group Corporation and International Trade and Tourism Cubanacan SA.
