Hotel El Doncel

Many rooms face the outside courtyard bar with music and loud customers making many rooms very noisy. When there is a party, such as the night we stayed, there was loud music until 3 in the morning and loud/drunk customers until 4:15 in the outdoor courtyard. Our room was above the large indoor party room and the staff was banging tables and chairs against each other and the walls until 5 in the morning. We had early reservations at the Alhambra the next morning, so NO SLEEP. TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE. STAY AWAY. Management should not rent out rooms above the party room during party nights. But the other rooms that face the courtyard would still get A LOT OF NOISE. ==========Another issue: When we checked in, the thermostat for the air conditioner worked. After returning from dinner, it did not. It was cool outside, but the room was hot. We wanted to open the window, but that would bring in MORE NOISE. So we kept the window closed and suffered more. After reading another review (about a very cold room in December due to management turning off heat during the night) it appears that management programs the thermostat to stop working at certain time. Terrible.

We booked this hotel because it had good reviews on booking.com. Total disappointment. We arrived at 13:30 and they hadn't started to clean the room. I work in a reception so I know how it is sometimes but the hotel wasn't full so why not give us another room which is free and clean already? So we made the check in and continued our day outside. Came back to the hotel at 18:30 and were freezing because in December the area is cold because of the Sierra Nevada mountains. We tried to turn on the heater in the room but it woudn't work, so I went to the reception.to ask how it works, only to hear from the waiter that the heat goes on at 20:00 in the evenings and goes of at 8:30 in the morning!!! Couldn't believe it. He offered us a small heater for the moment until the heat would go on automatically. We were so cold and since the material they use is mostly rock, it felt even colder. I told the waiter to give our money refunded since there was no way we were going to stay in a hotel which didn't offer heating in the middle of December even though it sais it on it's reviews!!! The waiter obviously had nothing to do with it, so he said he'll contact the receptionist. The receptionist came soon to our room to take away the small heater and apologized, telling us that the heat would be turner on earlier and left. The heater went on automatically as he had told, but really slow. Before leaving out for dinner, we asked the receptionist if we could have another room key so we could leave the other one in the room and it would be warm when we come back since it was a big room and the heater wasn't very powerful. He said (lied) that the heat would stay on even though we would take the card out. So when a few hours later we arrived to the hotel, the room was still cold. We had to sleep with a sheet, two blankets and the bed cover. And of course they had turned the heat off at 8:30 in the morning, so when we woke up at 9:30, the room was already cold. Also another thing worth mentioning, the wifi doesn't work. Only on the lowest signal and you have to try multiple times to get in. When you manage to get in, it doesn't even open for example Facebook properly, Luckily we had made our next hotel reservations before arriving to the hotel! The hotel itself is not bad looking and probably would be ok in the summer (is the aircon works..) and they fiz the wifi, but in the winter would definitelty avoid it!