Villa Da Madalena — Hotel in Madalena

We stayed at Villa Madalena for four nights and I was looking forward to leaving this place as soon as I set foot into the building. Location-wise it's great and it looks modern and new from the outside.  However, this changes drastically once you enter the rooms.

Our room - while large in size - was old and especially the bathroom was showing its age. The bathtub and shower had stains and lime spots and there was rust on the soap dispensers. During the first night, we were naive enough to leave the balcony door slightly open, causing 20 mosquitos to enter and eat us alive. No mosquito protection at all. The following nights we slept with closed windows, with occasional AC bursts to keep the air in the room somewhat fresh. The bed was super old and the mattresse hard as a brick wall. I could feel individual wires poking through.

Secondly, house keeping service was bad. They only gave us one tiny roll of toilet paper and forgot to give us a new one in the first two days. We had to take a roll from a public bathroom because after 11 no one seems to be around anymore. Also, they didn't change our bed sheets although there were several mosquito-caused blood stains on the sheets. Furthermore, you have to hang a sign onto the door handle if you want the room to be "cleaned". I expect this to be the default. Despite us doing this every day, it seemed like they didn't do anything but cleaning but the toilet and making the bed. One time, they threw the pillows onto my suitcase instead of the bed. When arriving, we got no information how to indicate which towels should be replaced or how to request room cleaning. We only learned about the room cleaning sign by chance because we ran into a cleaning lady who explained it. Unlike in other hotels in the azores, they do not provide beach/swimming towels.

Generally, the entire staff seemed very hands-off and didn't want to talk to the guests. This was the complete opposite experience to the hotels we stayed at before at the azores where everyone was super friendly and engaging.

Finally, let's talk about breakfast. The bread was cheap and dry, the toaster super old and either did nothing or burned the bread. The ham looked like the same 6 rolls of it lay in the refrigerator every day. I saw no-one eat a single slice of ham during the entire stay. You can also take bacon and eggs - theoretically. In practise, it seems like eggs and bacon are made once in the morning. If you come to breakfast a little bit later, you get dry and hard scrambled eggs and greasy bacon. Needless to say we never took much but stayed with bread and butter. Coffee was at least decent but that's about it and they were very minimalistic with the amount of provided milk.

Summary: don't stay at Villa Madalena if you value a clean room and at least decent breakfast. We expected more from a hotel and were heavily disappointed. I'd only recommend this place if you have no...

The Villa da Madalena is a hotel (where the reception is not always manned). It is wonderfully situated on a small hill, with beautiful views of the village and the island of Faial on the other side of a channel. The rooms are spacious, clean, have A/C, nice bathroom. Well maintained, and conveniently located. Very quiet, both during day and at night. Everything is easily reached in the nice village (supermarket, restaurants, diving operations). No TV or minibar - which are things we don’t need anyway. The breakfast has a wide selection as well. Best thing about the hotel is the lady who runs it. Extremely helpful in all requests. She even did laundry, and would not accept payment of it... Goes very recommended, next time we’re in Pico we will surely...

Maria is a fantastic host and made us feel at home on this incredible island. She had ideas of where to go and where to eat. Breakfast was fantastic and there were lots of nice options (which was impressive for there only being a few guests during the low season when we were there). Accommodation was clean with hot water, heating/ac. Bed was a little hard but not that big of a deal especially since everything else was perfect. Ideal to have a car as it’s not in the center of town but you need a car anyway to explore the island. Madalena is really. Nice town and I recommend staying there especially if you’re coming from Faial. Thank you for a wonderful stay. Looking forward...