The creation of a tourist and office complex located on the Renfe slab for a promising future has a price: 11 million euros. This is the sum of three phases of a project started in 2019 by an Oviedo businessman from Gran Canaria. Luis Suarez Hurle, consisting of a comprehensive renovation of a hotel with 155 rooms, a car park with 347 spaces and various premises of a complex built just over two decades ago on the railway tracks. The purpose of this ambitious investment is to prepare for the “tourist wave” that the capital of Asturias is experiencing and to increase the number of bookings with the inevitable arrival of AVE in the region. “We are betting on Oviedo because it has established itself as a quality urban destination,” the entrepreneur told the newspaper during a factory tour.
The Suarez family founded the Hotel de la Losa in 2002 on the advice of a now defunct Pepe Kosman, the great promoter of the Alsa bus company, with whom they have always had a great friendship. Plans to upgrade the hotel complex began to take shape shortly before the pandemic. “In 2019, we had good prospects and we wanted to start renovating everything,” explains Luis Suarez, who moved to the Canary Islands with his parents at the age of seven, where the family put down roots and opened the Hotel Principado in Playa del Inglés in the 1980s, which continues to operate at full capacity today.
The refurbishment of a 155-room hotel in Oviedo began shortly before the health crisis hit, which they took full advantage of to speed things up. “As bad as it all is, the calendar suits us,” he notes. Bernardo Suarezbrother and right hand of Luis in the daily supervision of the Hotel Carbayón.
The turnaround given to business during the quarantine has also made it possible to equip six meeting rooms, which are increasingly in demand for organizing congresses or professional meetings. “The sector of this kind of meetings is on the rise, and we have been able to position ourselves to give life to the hotel all year round,” says the director of the tourist complex. Juan Carlos Robles.
About a year ago, the second stage of the modernization of the complex began, and today it is almost completed. An investment of almost 4 million euros has led to radical improvements in energy efficiency. With these funds, a Tineo pellet fired thermal power plant was installed, capable of replacing the old gas system. As a result, the hotel now emits 113,000 kg less CO2, reducing its carbon footprint by 50%.
Added to this is the discovery of a cold thermal plant capable of producing hot water free of charge for six months, during which the air conditioning system does not stop working. “With all these systems, we will reduce energy consumption by 75%,” Luis Suarez says of some of the sites he visited this Wednesday with several technicians, his brother and daughter Elena Suarez, who are also in the family business.
An expedition from the Canary Islands was able to check on site the progress of the renovation of the Uria Center car park, located directly below the hotel. The three floors, which have 347 parking spaces open to the public, have been the subject of various works since April last year and will be open in mid-August, even though two floors are already operating as normal.
The underground car park will feature 42 electric vehicle charging points, as well as new lighting, digitization and decoration systems. “The car park is the front door for 80% of our customers and it should be welcoming and recommendatory,” the hotel owner says of some of the work designed by architect Maria del Val Menendez. “With the reform, it will become one of the best in Spain,” says Suarez.