We stayed one night in this hotel before beginning our Amazon trip with Gero tours (which incidentally was fantastic.) The rooms are extremely basic, a/c too noisy to keep on during the night and the beds hard and uncomfortable with grubby and torn sheets. We also had to pay extra for hot water in the room! The hotel itself is also very noisy and the breakfast poor. The one saving grace was the location which is very handy. There are better basic hotels out there for this kind of money, really for what you get and in comparison to other hotels we stayed in in Brazil it should be half the price it is.

I was a part of a group of twenty-four students who visited Manaus - a beautiful and impressive city. However, we had a very bad experience at the hotel where we stayed. The name of the hotel is Dez de Julio. Our initial enquiries at the hotel were handled by a guy who speaks English and operates a tour business at the hotel. The name of the tour company is Amazon Backpackers. Because we did not use his services, he decided that he had to get some money out of us so when we were checking out he claimed a part of our deposit . We had said to him while making arrangements to stay at the hotel that we may need transportation to get to the hotel when we arrive at the terminus but since we did not know the time of arrival we would call him when we got there. It turned out that our bus took us to the hotel directly. We were treated roughly when we tried to make a case that we could not be possibly charged for a service that we did not receive. My sister from Canada was pushed out of the office and our suitcases taken into a room to prevent us from leaving. In the end, because we were foreigners and had to leave for our return trip, we ended up just paying the money to leave. I have no problem with the hotel itself and there are other tour operators there but that particular set of tour operators are unscrupulous. I had read on the internet about that type of treatment being meted out to guests but decided to give them the benefit of the doubt but it proved correct.

This hotel has bad service, grumpy staff, and basic rooms with no windows to the exterior. It wasn't dirty, but the place definintely needs a facelift. Thankfully, it is right off a main street with internet cafes and restaurants nearby. The ONLY reason we stayed there is because Gero Amazon Tours has an office located inside the hotel lobby, and the Gero Tour staff are a godsend - we really couldn't figure out why such a fabulous Amazon company chose this hotel to link themselves to. I would never recommend this hotel unless you are arriving really late at night and departing on a Gero Amazon tour early the next morning.

So many negative reviews. Why? The hotel is very basic but clean and with a spectacular location, smack in the center of town and 2 minutes walk from the Opera House. The breakfast is basic but adequate and there is free wifi in the dining room--which I found also extended to my first floor room. The price is right and the hotel is meant as a stopover to/from the jungle. C'mon folks, it does what it is meant to do and there are lots of places where you could spend more and get less.