Hotel Plaza Colon - Granada Nicaragua

Where Granada's Main Square Becomes Your Terrace

Most colonial hotels in Granada turn inward, and with good reason: the courtyard is where the air moves. Plaza Colón does that too, but it also does the opposite. The house sits directly on Parque Central, and its upper floor gives onto verandas that face the square, the cathedral and the arcades that frame it. From up there the city stops being a set of monuments and becomes a working plaza, with horse carriages waiting at the kerb and the light going orange around six. The building dates from the nineteenth century and has been run as a hotel for well over fifteen years, long enough for the staff to have settled into it.

Why It Works

Three things decided it. The address is the first: there is one square in Granada that everybody walks through, and this house is on it, so you never negotiate transport to reach the centre because you are already standing in it. The second is the choice offered upstairs. Six junior suites carry the balconies, the standard rooms do not, and the hotel is straightforward about the difference rather than blurring it. The third is the way the place has been kept: period furniture, dark wood against pale walls, ceilings high enough to do the cooling work before the air conditioning has to.

Why This Location

Parque Central is the hinge of the old city. The cathedral stands across the square. La Calzada, the pedestrian street of restaurants and bars, runs from one corner of it down towards the shore of Lake Nicaragua, which puts dinner a few minutes from the front door on foot. Boats out to Las Isletas and the road up Mombacho both start from this side of town, so the two excursions most visitors come for can be done without changing hotels. The trade is noise: a square this busy is not silent, and the rooms that face it are the ones with the view.

Fast Facts

• Price: Premium

• Vibe: colonial, composed, front row

• Rooms: around thirty, including six junior suites with balconies over Parque Central

• Best For: first visits to Granada, couples, travellers who intend to walk everywhere

• Our Favorite Thing About the Hotel: breakfast laid out on the pool terrace in the larger of the two courtyards

• Dining: an adjoining café-restaurant handles breakfast and daytime plates; there is no full restaurant inside the house

• Amenities: swimming pool, two open-air courtyards, air conditioning, in-room safes, Travelife Gold and Preferred by Nature certification

• Attractions: Granada cathedral and Parque Central, on the doorstep; La Calzada; Lake Nicaragua and Las Isletas; Mombacho volcano

What the Upper Floor Buys You

Standard rooms come with a king or two queens, air conditioning, a safe and a television, dressed in the same dark wood and bright paint as the rest of the house. They are comfortable and unremarkable, which is the honest description. The six junior suites are the reason to book ahead. They sit on the upper floor, they open onto the balcony line above the colonnade, and they turn a good hotel into a memorable one. If they are taken for your dates, the pool courtyard is the consolation, and it is a decent one.

Breakfast by the Pool, Dinner Around the Corner

The larger courtyard holds a proper swimming pool with room to sit, and breakfast is served on its terrace. Beyond that the hotel does not try to be a restaurant: the building will not take one, and an adjoining café covers coffee and daytime plates. In most cities that would count against a hotel of this standing. In Granada it is barely a constraint, because everything from a vigorón stand to a full dining room sits within a few blocks of the square.

A House That Took Certification Seriously Early

Plaza Colón was the first hotel in the region certified by the Rainforest Alliance, and it now holds Travelife Gold and Preferred by Nature certification, the first in the city to do so. That is a matter of process rather than promise: water, waste, sourcing and staff conditions audited by somebody other than the hotel. Check in from two in the afternoon, out by eleven, and ask about the balcony rooms before you arrive rather than after.