The students of the fifth academic year of the Cádiz Environmental Sciences Faculty visited the facilities at Hotel Fuerte Conil on 25th April. They also attended a lecture offered by Joaquín Pineda, Director of Quality and Sustainable Development, on the company’s history and strategies, underlying the hotel environmental features.

This Cádiz hotel is regarded as the world’s seventh hotel, out of the 12,000 hotel establishments that make up the European tourist catalogue, thanks to its environmental management system. Hotel Fuerte Conil is located on the Fontanilla beach, it is a two storey building full of patios enabling the natural ventilation of its rooms. Its clay floors make good use of the thermal inertia in a real hot area. In both gardens and pools twilight sensors measure luminosity to establish the use of street lamps. The hotel establishment also counts on with a Robot, a computer system controlling consumption and avoiding highly expensive demand. This system controls the amount of energy to be used in order not to exceed the limit established by the hotel. According to Joaquín Pineda, these and other techniques make this hotel establishment “a differentiation factor in the market, a question of positioning of this company within a society more and more concerned about the environment”. 

The hotel Fuerte Conil director of quality and sustainable development encouraged the environmental sciences students to take on a project like this one, assuring them that his hotel “was a work premise and a business strategy”.