I have truly ambivalent feelings about my 3-night stay at this brand new hotel that was constructed in December 2006 (per the receptionist). I would ordinarily give it a 2-star rating, but the extreme friendliness and sincererity of its employees bump it up to a 3. To explain, let me just go down the list of my observations one at a time.
Location. To get there you drive about 50 kms (or less) south of the city of Cordoba. This means that exploring the city is really not a viable option. The final stretch of road toward the hotel had us, American tourists, pretty nervous because it's an unpaved dirt path. That said, construction on the road was apparent and the hotel clerks told us a paved road will be in place soon.
Given the hotel's lack of easy access to Cordoba City, you would think the trade-off is proximity to good rural destinations within the province of Cordoba. But this isn't the case either. The nearby town of Despenaderos is little more than a collection of gas (petrol) pumps. Alta Gracia is a larger town that, granted, has an interesting Che Guavara museum. But it wasn't a particularly attractive town overall compared to the town we explored by driving further west for another 3-4 hours. We thoroughly enjoyed our side trips through the Sierra mountain range to the towns of Mina Claveros and ultimately Merlo. But the trip back from those charming destinations took, again, 3-4 hours. That's 8 hours of driving in a single day.
The rooms were very clean and pleasing to the eye. We had a beautiful view of the golf course from ours. For some strange reason, though, the designer of the hotel went haywire when it came to the bathrooms. They were clean, sure. But tiny. There's barely room to move around, which is bizarre since the room itself was spacious. They could have easily expanded the bathroom. In addition, the shower was also oddly designed so that there's no curtain, just a partial glass divider. It was impossible to shower without water spilling out onto the floor.
The lobby area is gorgeous and huge, with again nice views of the golf course. Anyone would enjoy sitting and relaxing there with a glass of wine. The restaurant down below requires a walk down a staircase that I as a young man have no problem with, but I can guarantee will cause some poor elderly person to fall down some day because of design flaws. The steps are too short near the curve. Looks great but, again, just a weird design choice.
The restaurant itself is okay. The waitresses are very friendly and helpful, though none of them spoke even a smidgeon of English. The food was acceptable. But there are no nearby amenities for eating, and after two consecutive meals there we couldn't stand eating there again.
There are no US-friendly outlets for laptops or other electrical devices, so bring your own adapter. (I had to go out and buy one in Alta Gracia). The wifi access worked great once I had my laptop up and running. There are also two free computers in the lobby with Internet access.
The free gym was a terrible disappointment. The exercise bike was not working at all. The treadmill required the deciphering of some apparently secret code of pushing buttons that, after 10 minutes, I gave up trying to crack. I finally settled for the only remaining machine in the room, which was a cross-trainer. For some reason they had raised the temperature in the gym to sauna-like levels. The whole gym experience was just plain bad.
As I said earlier, to balance all of this off, the employees were very friendly, polite, and helpful. In my experience in this beautiful country this is simply the way all Argentinians are by nature, so whether to credit the hotel for this friendliness or not I'll leave up to the reader.
My overall sentiments of this hotel are mixed. I suppose I would recommend it if you want to relax in one place and just play golf for a few days, though eating every meal at the restaurant for that long would drive me crazy. Using it as a base to explore rural Cordoba province will not be ideal. Using it as a base to explore Cordoba City is not feasible.
