THE FIVE-STAR Hotel Miragem, situated on the Marginal Road overlooking Cascais Bay, opened its doors on September 7. The hotel, which took five years to complete, is operating in ‘test-mode’. According to General Manager, José Branco, the hotel’s formal inauguration is scheduled for the end of this month.
Set against a hillside next to the Hotel Estoril-Sol, which closed down last year, the new hotel boasts 200 deluxe rooms, including 20 suites, 11 meeting rooms for a total of up to 800 people, three restaurants and three bars. A Holmes Place health club, which began operating last year, is part of the hotel complex.
The Hotel Miragem is owned by the José Cristóvão Group, which also runs the Hotel dos Templários in Tomar, the Lago Azul Inn in Ferreira do Zézere and the Hotel Le Presidente Meridien in Luanda, Angola.
Meanwhile, the 21-floor, 310-room Hotel Estoril-Sol, which opened in the early 1960s, is to be demolished. Over the past two years, several dates were set for taking down the massive building, but all were cancelled. “If everything goes according to plan, the hotel will be demolished by the end of next summer,” a Cascais Câmara spokeswoman told The Resident last week. “It is a complicated process because of the risk of shifting grounds.”
The plan to demolish the hotel, owned by the Estoril-Sol company, which also runs Estoril Casino, was launched two years ago by Cascais Câmara President, António Capucho. The reason given was the fact that, as Capucho pointed out at the time, the hotel’s “excessive, aggressive shape and size do not blend in with the surrounding landscape”.
Estoril-Sol managing director, Mário Assis Ferreira, agreed, commenting that he was glad that the opportunity finally had arrived to “destroy such a profoundly disturbing building”. Replacing the Hotel Estoril-Sol will be a luxury apartment complex named Estoril-Sol Parque. Hans van der Put
