Yaiza! A 52-room spa, eight restaurants, six pools…
If you want to feel the hot spring sun on your back and white sand between your toes, the Princesa Yaiza Suite Hotel Resort is a good place to forget European financial turmoil and completely succumb to the gods of pleasure.
The sprawling but characterful 385-room resort is on the Canary Island of Lanzarote, 75 miles off Morocco’s southern coast.
The five-star hotel covers a large portion of the Playa Dorada beachfront on the south of the island; when you walk around it gives the impression of a series of interconnected white-fronted colonial-style villas. Indeed, despite its size, it’s more of an attractive mini village than a massive resort and has an air of real vibrancy: bright colours light up numerous terraces and tempting swimming pools, located at the heart of the resort.
Half of the resort’s guests are families, while most of the remainder are couples. And with this in mind, it is set out to allow adults to laze around, while their children scamper about having a whale of a time.
Children have a 108,000 sq ft area called Kikoland reserved just for them. It caters for babies up to teenagers, and for the more active, there are football pitches and tennis courts, while for the creative there are magic shows and musicals the kids can put on themselves.
Adults, on the other hand, can saunter between the beach, and the resort’s swimming pools, eight restaurants and 52-room spa.
The Isla deLobos is probably the pick of the eateries. Head chef Paolo Soggui is passionate about using local produce and slow-cooking it to bring out the flavours. We ate pork that had been cooked for 14 hours at 45 degrees centigrade. A fork was all you needed to part the tender meat from the bone, and every mouthful made you appreciate the effort it had taken to get to your plate.
The thalassotherapy spa is also a feature of the resort. The spa uses seawater and seaweed treatments that are rich in salts, vitamins and amino acids, which are supposed to be good for us. Though after an hour of having seawater projected at me from all angels, I couldn’t helping thinking that I would have been better off bobbing about in the actual sea, which was only 50 yards away. But actually – the two go together rather well. It’s a decadent approach, but hey, that’s what the place is all about.