The Mayor of Faro Rogério Bacalhau claims that the Faro region, and most importantly its capital, does not have enough hotel space to accommodate the number of tourists that he would like to see in the regional capital.
"We have a problem in the city, the problem is a lack of beds. We have a landmark hotel, but the other hotels we have are old, they do their job and are adequate but we can not accommodate large groups coming to town," claims Bacalhau.
Faro council wants to see more hospitality capacity despite its gleeful claim last December that the number of tourist accommodation facilities had tripled in five years, from a dozen hotels and guest houses in 2008, to 43 locations in 2013.
According to data from the National Statistics Institute for 2012, the latest available, the capital of the Algarve had 20 units, 11 of which were hotels, in comparison to 145 in Albufeira and 65 in Loulé.
Faro’s lack of tourism capacity is evident, it has only 2,059 beds compared to Albufeira’s 43,693.
Bacalhau wants to bring big events to Faro to attract tourists but currently is not in a position to do so, unless visitors are happy camping out such as at the annual motorcycle event next to the airport which attracts upwards of 15,000 people.
The lack of interest in Faro as a tourist destination can be pinned on successive council regimes with restrictive planning regulations, the lack of well-publicised transport links to and from the airport and the lack of targetted publicity and promotion of Faro as a tourist destination.
The hotel argument is a chicken and egg one. The city never has managed to define what its appeal is to which tourist segments. It lacks beds certainly, but are big five star hotels needed, or perhaps should there be a concentration on weekend break hostels and smaller hotels?
A case in point is the old brewery (pictured below) which the previous mayor Macário Correia tried to sell at auction, twice. It currently is rented out to the Associação Recreativa e Cultural dos Músicos, but had the council been serious about tourist accommodation a deal could have been done to create a hotel on a first-class site within the old city walls.
Without Faro's leaders knowing whom to attract and for what reasons the complaint that Faro’s woes are due to a lack of five star hotels does not hold water.
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