Grand Hotel Bali

The Gran Hotel Bali is a 186-meter, 53-story skyscraper used as a hotel located in Benidorm (Alicante, Spain). It was inaugurated on May 17, 2002 and is the tallest hotel in Europe and was the tallest building in Spain since it surpassed the Picasso Tower until November 2006 after being surpassed by the Espacio Tower.

It has a total of 186 meters, despite the fact that the partial construction plan anticipated a height of 210 meters. The facility is four-star, and has 53 floors (51 above ground and 2 basements), of which 5 are intended for use as technical floors and elevator machine room, 1 as a duplex floor for the two upper suites, 1 as a viewing deck and the remaining 43 as rooms and mezzanine floors, with a total of 440 rooms. It had a cost of 90 million euros.

After the construction of Intempo, it has become the second tallest building in the town.

History

The Gran Hotel Bali, which is located in La Cala de Benidorm, began construction on June 20, 1988, with a budget close to 2,000 million pesetas, and its structure was completed ten years later. From that moment on, the phase of fitting out and decorating the rooms began, distributed in two buildings, of which the second (19 floors) was the original Bali Hotel, already existing before the 53-floor skyscraper was built.

Description

It is considered the safest hotel in Spain^{[citation required]} since it has modern computer systems to avoid catastrophes: fireproof materials, windows that open automatically to letting the smoke out, doors that close by themselves to prevent the passage of fire and a sophisticated computer device capable of notifying technicians without human intervention.

The Gran Hotel Bali belongs to the Bali group, with two other hotels also spread throughout Benidorm, on the two beaches. They are the Cabana and the Benidorm Center hotel. Three and four stars.

The project director, architect Antonio Escario, founding partner of Escario Arquitectos, has worked alongside a large team of collaborators who designed a reinforced concrete structure for this hotel, calculated by the Engineering Studio Florentino Regalado & Associates for a total constructed area of more than 40,000 square meters.

You can go up to its viewpoint using a panoramic elevator (the viewpoint costs three euros for clients and six for non-clients).

Events

Annually the hotel hosts a stair-climbing race to the viewpoint. In the first edition in 2003, the Australian Paul Crake rose in 4 minutes and 35 seconds. This record remained unbeaten for eleven years until in 2014 Ángel Llorens, a 43-year-old firefighter, achieved a mark of 4 minutes and 33 seconds. In 2016 Christian Riedl obtained a time of 4 minutes and 20 seconds.

In 2008 the first base jumping championship was held, the Spain Base 08, and since 2009 it has hosted the Base Jump Extreme World Championship, the first world jumping championship base, which each year will begin at the Gran Hotel Bali and will travel to various cities around the world in search of the best jumpers.

Since its inauguration in 2002, it has hosted the Great International Chess Festival.

In October 2010, the Moroccan tightrope walker Mustafá "Danger" achieved a Guinness record after riding a motorcycle the more than 500 meters that separate Tossal de La Cala and the Gran Bali hotel on a steel cable, at an average height of 150 meters.

The national table football championship also takes place every year, held during the month of May.

Appearance in the media

In 1993 the half-built building (they were on the 30th floor approximately) appeared in the film Golden Eggs directed by Bigas Luna and starring Javier Bardem. It also appears in the science film fiction The Possibility of an Island, by French director Michel Houellebecq released in 2008.