I intended to stay one night at La Pineta with my group of friends. The hotel has rooms in two buildings, and six of us were staying in three connected rooms in the second building. About twenty minutes into our stay, we realized that one of the bathrooms was covered in ants. When we informed the manager, he quickly sent a worker to spray with ant poison, filling all three rooms with overpowering toxic fumes. When we voiced our concerns to the manager (difficultly, because of the language barrier; luckily we found a common third language - Spanish), he insisted the rooms would air out. We asked for another room, insisting at the very least the sprayed room could not be slept in. They agreed that we could split two rooms amongst the six of us, and that they would lower the price by about 10%. We could smell the fumes from outside the building!!! It would have been dangerous and absurd for us to accept such conditions - and no hotel with any sort of professionlism would even suggest such a thing. Luckily we were able to find available rooms in an apartment rented out by a sweet older lady, with the help of the travel office on the main street.

Though my experience at La Pineta may be an exceptional case, I cannot help but be shocked at the unprofessional manner in which it was handled. We were students, and not terribly stringent about hotel quality, but to sleep in a room filled with brain-cell depleting toxic fumes would have been unacceptable by any standards.