Fooled by the nice pictures on Hotel.com as well as the opportunity to enjoy relaxing spa-facilities we booked 4 days at Los Olivos. However, we soon came to regret this due to more reasons.

1) The hotel is extremely noisy. One thing is that the walls are paper-thin, another is that the hotel staff starts up with very noisy activities at 7 in the morning. Laughing and talking just outside the rooms, sweeping with a stiff broom on rocky-parts, rolling trolleys around on bumpy paths etc.
Sadly, this is not all. During our stay we experienced a) that maintenance workers started extremely noisy work at as early as 7 in the morning - ripping out bricks and tiles slamming hammers into walls and floor as well as using of power tools. This heavily influenced the comfort of the hotel and ruined sleep for us! b) The hotel keeps cats that cries and fights every night making extreme noise and discomfort due to the unpleasant sounds.

These experiences are just plane unbelievable to us and thus we can conclude that we leave this hotel tired, unrested and unhappy.

In the following some other areas of interest is shortly covered.

2) The hotel staff (half of them friendly) showed poor knowledge of the area and sights around Oaxaca. Thus we acted on poor advise and found us spending many hours in a car for almost no reason.

3) The distance to the city-center (the Zocalo) is app. 10 minutes by taxi and equivalent longer by foot. The price pr. taxi is about 35/40 pesos.

4) The hotel only has few and rather poor facilities. The restaurant is not good at all and actually quite expensive. Especially compared to the cheap and nice alternatives just around the corner. An important aspect here is, that although you pay to stay at the hotel you still have to pay for the Spa-faciilities, which are not cheap at all. This was very disappointing to us.

Summing up on the above we cannot recommend Los Olivos to anyone and especially not, when we know that there are much better hotel alternatives in Oaxaca. We stayed 1 night at Hotel Fortin to almost the same prize (incl. a great breakfast at H. Fortin!). We tried to cancel our pre-booked rooms at Los Olivos (we had already stayed there one night), but experienced that we could not get a refund. Everything was much, much better at the other hotel and we later learned that much better alternatives were available at almost the same price in Oaxaca.

Don not book your Oaxaqueñian nights at Los Olivos Spa. You will be disappointed.

This hotel is often advertised as "5 mins" from the downtown -- perhaps by car. It's a 40 minute walk. The hotel is on a very busy thoroughfare and the rooms are constructed with slat windows, meaning noise (and everything else) leaks in. I found the staff and other guests quite noisy. The desk staff were not unfriendly, but not entirely welcoming either. There is very little English spoken by staff. The restaurant is quite good and the "yoga institute" is worth a visit, although all classes are in Spanish. The spa is lovely, but if you're headed all the way to Oaxaca on vacation, do yourself a favor and stay in town at a lovely restored colonial house and book a massage -- not a room -- at this place.