Parador de Alarcon

Excellent hotel in a castle. Nice service and food. A great improvement to paradors since we stayed in them ,hopefully the rest are as good as this one .

We were booked in to the Parador for 2 nights. On arrival, we went to reception. There was no-one there and no bell or anything. After over 5 minutes we went to the hotel bar and asked if reception was manned. We were told it was and when we said we had been waiting over 5 minutes the barman said he would look for them. We went back to reception and again waited for nearly a further 10 minutes before the receptionist arrived. Not a good start for a 4-star establushment. We did the paperwork, were given the key and made our way to our room which was as described. Our next problem was the in-room safe. The way to lock/unlock it was to swipe your credit card. This was a method I'd never seen before. So I decided to try it empty. I shut the door, swiped my card, and it locked. But it wouldn't unlock. I phoned reception and was told she would be straight up. 10 minutes later I went back to reception to find out what was going on; it seems there was difficulty finding the machine and the handwritten notes on how to unlock it. Machine and notes found, we went back to the room where initially I was blamed for doing it wrong, which did annoy me. But in any case, the safe was unlocked and I retried locking and unlocking it....all ok. Now the room..... There are no drawers anywhere. The wardrobe had no drawers and the bedside tables had no drawers...there was nowhere to put anything that didn't hang apart from a small area below the hanging clothes. The bathroom. Very nice with 2 sinks. But on the one we used, when the cold was used it dripped badly from the join. Poor maintenance. The toilet itself was in a separate area off the bathroom. The floor around the toilet looked very stained, as if used by people with a bad aim! Again, get that sorted out. It's clear that at some stage the door in to the room was too long. The tiled floor is heavily scratched. It is obvious that the door wasn't rectified for a long time. The bed itself is on a platform about 10cm high. This looks as if it was constructed by an apprentice on their first day. The planks themselves are poor quality; they felt like cheap laminate and, as the supporting structure didn't feel adequate, many planks sagged as you walked on them. This is simply poor workmanship and low quality materials. The lift felt dirty and worn out. There was a bag of what appeared to be laundry outside our door for the entire 2 days we were there. The room is sold as having wifi in all areas. Our room had no wifi. I reported it to reception and was assured there was wifi. I stood my ground and eventually the receptionist admitted that there was a problem and that our room and 2 others had no wifi. There was a problem and it had been reported to the maintenance company. All things considered, bearing in mind the premium price we were paying for this room, I was dissatisfied. I certainly would not stay here again which is a shame as it is a beautiful building. This is supposed to be a 4-star establ

The Parador is one of the best we have stayed at, it is relatively small which makes it quite intimate and the setting, overlooking the Jucar River, is stunning. Also, Parador vegetarian dinner options are often limited but at Alarcon there were a number of very good choices-other Paradors please take note!