The Tías City Council wishes to congratulate all the people linked to the San Antonio hotel on the 50th anniversary of its inauguration. This four-star hotel, located at one end of Los Pocillos beach, was inaugurated on January 5, 1973 by the Minister of Tourism, Alfredo Sánchez Bella.
The mayor of Tías, José Juan Cruz, on behalf of the entire corporation, highlights the importance of launching this hotel to initiate the tourist take-off of Puerto del Carmen and Lanzarote, where few hotels of this size operated, such as Los Fariones, in Puerto del Carmen, or Gran Hotel, in Arrecife.
The San Antonio hotel, today belonging to the VIK chain, opened its doors with 360 rooms after an investment of 500 million pesetas by an English capital company called British Cornmanwetch CO, through its subsidiary Hocasa and owner of the Reina Isabel hotel, in Gran Canaria, and the San Felipe hotel, in Tenerife, as stated in the book El Postigo de Tías, by Juan Cruz Sepúlveda.
"Puerto del Carmen is the origin of tourism in Lanzarote and the inauguration of the San Antonio hotel confirmed the economic potential of the area. Numerous people from the island and the peninsula were hired and a complex of 35 homes was built in the town of Tías for the workers, who had a bus service to transport them to the hotel," they say from the Tías City Council.
According to El Postigo de Tías, “the area did not have any services, neither water nor electricity. It also did not have paved access, because the road was not paved until 1974.” It was the hotel developer that provided an electrical energy production group and a seawater desalination plant for the hotel.
