Hotel stars are multiplying along Gran Vía, Madrid’s main shopping avenue. In the last decade alone, two dozen of its buildings have been transformed into establishments dedicated to luxury tourism. Entire office and residential buildings have changed use to facilitate the arrival of large international chains, transforming a street once populated with varied activities but which is increasingly tending towards a tourist monoculture.
The number of hotel beds available on Gran Vía alone has doubled in the last decade, with around 10,000 beds, 6,700 of which are new, according to the analytical work of Somos Madrid, through a compilation of recent openings, renovations and nascent projects that have been approved in recent years.
The last one to appear on the list is the one designed by Phillipe Starck for the Brach brand, an exclusive chain of five-star hotels that will arrive in the Spanish capital thanks to the approval of a special plan by the Madrid City Council. The building on which it is located, at number 20 Gran Vía, was designed a century ago for rental housing, although it ended up housing offices of different companies and was even occupied by the Ministry of Education of the Community of Madrid.
The Brach is one of five hotel projects under construction on Gran Vía. Going down towards the intersection with Alcalá are the works of the emblematic Metropolis, which will transform its old offices into a boutique hotel with a gym. At number 60 of the avenue is the Roman buildingwhich will also transform its offices and homes into 126 rooms for tourists. The promoters of the project assure that “the market does not demand homes in this environment with the large surface area that those of the original project present” and that “the only possible use in a building of these characteristics and protection” is to become a hotel.
If we continue along the same sidewalk, going down towards the Plaza de España, we find another block of old rental houses converted into offices. It will be transformed into 112 rooms by Bicon Capital, a company that sets the minimum price of a double room per night at 210 euros for its future clients, according to the financial economic plan consulted by this newspaper. Hanging the entire sign would bring in 23,520 euros in billing each day, not counting the ancillary services.
They are the ones who come, but the data analyzed separates those who arrived in the last ten years from those who were there before. The number of rooms available on Gran Vía, adding all the current ones and those that have an authorized project, amounts to 4,719 hotel stays, distributed mainly in four and five star establishments, with almost 10,000 beds, according to the calculations made by this newspaper (two per room, except in the case of apartment buildings).
Of the total number of hotel beds, two thirds (around 6,754 beds) have arrived on Gran Vía in the last decade or their construction has already been authorized by Madrid City Council. The largest building, by far, is the Riu on Plaza España, which opened 586 rooms to the tourist market in 2018, followed by the Barceló de la Torre in nearby Madrid with 258. In the same square, VP Design has contributed 214 additional rooms.
Other notable openings have been Cristiano Ronaldo’s Pestana (2021) at number 29, the Hyatt next door (2017), which crowned its project with a spectacular sculptural group of the goddess Diana or, most recently, the Hilton in Montera (93 rooms), at the former Actaeon cinemas.
Below is the list of all hotels compiled in this report:
The statistics focus on Gran Vía and leave aside other important buildings opened or planned in the area of Sol, Preciados and Alcalá, where in recent years they have opened the Madrid edition (200 more rooms) in the Monte de Piedad building or. the projects of UMusic in Canalejas (70 rooms) and of the founder of Prosegur in Alcalá street (60 rooms), among many others that we publish in Somos Madrid. Nor does it include the thousands of tourist apartments that operate outside the law in the capital, especially in the streets near the Gran Vía axis.
The arrival of these luxury hotels has been accompanied by significant changes in the commercial fabric of Gran Vía, which has been filled with flagship stores located on the ground floor of these hotel facilities and terraces on their roofs, where a drink can go from 2 p.m. to midnight. 26 euros, according to an article in El País. Emblematic businesses such as La Casa del Libro have also been renovated or others have disappeared due to the strength of franchises and the increase in rental prices in this premium neighborhood of Madrid.
Tourist reconversion facilitated by the Town Hall and the Community
“Madrid is adapting to the new times with an exclusive hotel offer that makes our city an ambitious and unique destination, a European benchmark in high-impact tourism and one of the leading destinations in Europe and the world,” explained the mayor of the capital at the end of 2021. Almeida already assured then that new hotel openings were necessary due to the “strong increase in tourism” in the capital.
Both the PP and Ciudadanos, from their urban planning department in the last term, have accelerated in recent years the opening of new hotels in the capital, a trend that Manuela Carmena had already begun to facilitate during her term, through an Accommodation Plan with which an attempt was made to protect the inhabited interior streets from tourism, but the hotel projects on the main avenues were left at the mercy of investment capital.
President Isabel Díaz Ayuso also highlights the arrival of international hotel brands as responsible for part of the “tourism boom” that the Community of Madrid is experiencing, thanks to which more than 14 million visitors arrived in the region in 2023, 4% more than before the pandemic and an absolute record. They came mainly from the United States, Mexico, France, Italy, the United Kingdom and Colombia. The spending left by tourists, in the absence of publication of definitive data, is estimated at 16.1 billion euros, or 8% of Madrid’s GDP.
