Two Bellevues, There Are Only Two Bellevues

How do you make two hotels out of one? It's not so difficult when the one hotel is not one hotel.

What is this riddle? It is a riddle that has been perplexing hoteliers for many years. It is what on earth you do with a problem like Bellevue.

If you don't know Alcúdia's Bellevue, then you should. There simply isn't anywhere quite like it. It is an attraction in its own right. It is the single largest complex anywhere in Mallorca and probably in Spain and is testimony to an early-seventies philosophy of tourism that had seen huge complexes created elsewhere in the Mediterranean.

Unlike, say, the spaceship-style design of two of the main buildings at Cap d'Agde in the south of France, Bellevue is a series of individual apartment blocks (seventeen in all). But the thinking was similar. And this thinking conceived Bellevue as apartments, not as a hotel or hotels. Originally, they were meant to have been sold off as timeshares.

Like Cap d'Agde, the philosophy regarding the style of accommodation was one of packing as many apartments and people into an area as possible; 1400 apartments in the case of Bellevue. The accommodation was standardised into three types and was always fairly basic. The emphasis back then was straightforward; holidaymakers came for the sun alone, and the accommodation was somewhere for them to lay their heads.

Bellevue's history has been dogged by ownership and financial wrangling, while the original idea of timeshare sales failed completely. In the eighties, it was finally, after years of being all but empty, conceived as a single "hotel".

The history of ownership and financial troubles brings us up to today, to the former owners of the site, Grupo Marsans, and to a court administering the affairs of Marsans' bankrupt hotel chain, Hotetur.

An agreement, seemingly now only requiring the judge's approval, will see two hotel groups running Bellevue. BlueBay (Al Andalus Management Hotels), which currently operates the site, and Luabay, part of the Orizonia travel group, will share it, 50% each. What is really intriguing is the fact that documentation has apparently already been lodged with the Balearic Government tourism ministry which would permit the conversion of Bellevue into two hotels, or, strictly speaking, groups of hotels.

Luabay's interest stems partly, one imagines, from the fact that Bellevue was the guarantee for a debt that Marsans owed to Orizonia. Also, until earlier this year, Luabay had no hotel interests in Mallorca. It took over a hotel in Arenal and has agreed to acquire three others, all in Cala Mayor. It would appear to be in an expansion mode.

Splitting Bellevue up has long seemed to be a sensible approach. Arguably, it is too big for any one operator, while it was never actually created with the intention of being a hotel as such, certainly not a single hotel. Splitting it up, though, brings with it potential headaches, and if the agreement is formalised, as seems likely, then the two hotel groups will have to get their heads around those headaches.

One of them is how you actually split the complex. To give an idea of the layout of Bellevue, the blocks are more or less evenly distributed to both sides of a road. The trouble is that mostly all the facilities - restaurants etc. - are on one side.

Another is how the separate hotels would be marketed. They couldn't surely both be called Bellevue, could they? To do so would cause massive confusion. The name, though, is extremely well-known, albeit not necessarily for the right reasons. Bellevue may be loved by many, but there are many who hate it and give full vent to their feelings across the internet.

A further headache is tackling the age of the apartments. The size of Bellevue has always constrained redevelopment, mainly because of the sheer cost. The apartments don't have air-conditioning, for example.

Creating two hotels sounds as though it should be an opportunity, one of pushing Bellevue into the tourist twenty-first century. It offers possibilities for different markets, different styles of hotel even. Whether, though, the development would be forthcoming, who can tell? One thing, though, is for sure. The peculiar story of one of the island's most peculiar hotel complexes is set to have another chapter written.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.