Once-illegal Riviera hotel seeks permit for 53 rooms

A small hotel illegally extended by the Polidano Group but regularised in 2001, and which then had an extra floor added to it in 2015, is set to grow further by 53 rooms built on the hotel’s fifth floor.

The Riviera Hotel at Marfa was sold to FTI Hotel Management Malta, a company owned by German company Frosch Touristik, in 2011. 

In this way the 61-room hotel grew to a 242-room hotel in 2001, and is now set to increase from the 293 rooms approved in 2015 to 346 rooms.

Plans submitted by applicant Beppe Bugeja show an increase of rooms in the fifth floor, from the approved 34 rooms to 66, and an increase from 57 rooms to 77 on the fourth floor.

Although the extension is being proposed on the same area approved in 2014, the increase in massing of the hotel is bound to have a visual impact.

In 2015 the hotel was allowed a recessed fifth floor to minimise the visual impact, but this will change to a full-blown floor if the application is approved.

Originally built as a small 16-room hotel in the 1960s, the ‘Solemar’ became the centre of a planning controversy in the late 1990s.  Developer Charles Polidano obtained a PA permit to extend the hotel in 1997 despite a negative recommendation by the PA’s planning directorate; another application for an extension was refused in 2000 but Polidano carried out the expansion illegally, and in 2001 the PA was asked to sanction this extension retroactively.

The case caused wide embarrassment within the PA, as its planning directorate urged a refusal, arguing that the development was incompatible with the rural and coastal characteristics of the area, and also ran counter to the Structure Plan.

Instead the then-MEPA board legalised the development on pain of a Lm200,000 (€460,000) fine on Polidano.