Casa Familiar, Santa Marta Hostels
Casa Familiar is a short walk to the beach and city centre of Santa Marta, Columbia. The hostel offers cheap accommodation in Santa Marta, and a wealth of rooms are available across many floors.
The roof terrace has a tiny kitchen and sink, which is just about adequate for preparing breakfast, but nothing else. To be honest, the walk up to the top floor in northern Columbia’s humidity is enough to put you off preparing any sort of dinner once you get up there. And remember to get the key (who is going to steal a sink?) from reception. The smart choice is to head to the beach front for grilled fish and cold beer.
Downstairs next to reception the communal area is available to guests. It’s a plastic table and a fridge. You have to share this with the hostels family of twenty – it feels a little strange. But then the clue to the atmosphere is in this hostel’s name, so technically they warn you in advance!
Our room was small, hot and had basic bathroom facilities. The shower was literally just a copper pipe poking out of the wall (see the video). That said, it was clean enough for our nights stay, but the bed was old and it smelt a little musty.
The Grandma of the ‘casa’ also offers a laundry washing service. Just ring the bell to wake her up, and she’ll stick your best t-shirts and designer underwear in with her smalls and the kids clothing. She’ll return it in a bin bag the next day, short of socks and smelling of Grandma. She even asks for money for turning your white items to a 60 plus shade of grey.
This hostel got very noisy at night, despite only housing a few guests the echo from the downstairs ‘familiar’ was enough to keep us awake past our bed time. The next morning, around 6.18am to be precise, construction work started outside next to our room. Suffice to say, we promptly checked out and caught the first taxi we could grab to nearby Taganga to recover from the familiar ordeal.
The Good:
- Location
- Clean rooms
The not so Good:
- Noise
- Lack of facilities
- Poor laundry service
