Overlooking Harlech since 1910, St David’s Hotel might remind you of a certain cult Stanley Kubrick film about a haunted hotel as it looms over the town beneath.
There have been plans to demolish the almost 100-year-old hotel since 2009, a year after it closed its doors for good.
At its prime, the bustling 5-star hotel's 60 rooms were booked by tourists and golfers, who flocked there to play a few rounds at Royal St David’s Golf Club opposite.
Old mattresses, curtains and broken furniture litter the decaying rooms where peeling wallpaper and plaster cover the exposed floorboards.
Guest's bills from the 1990’s freeze the hotel in time as it waits to be torn down.
It might have been closed to paying guests for over a decade, but there are still visitors at the hotel - colonies of bats can be found hanging from the rotting rafters.
Lesser horseshoe bats are roosting in the roof beams. The species has been declining everywhere else in the UK, but is making a comeback in Wales in places like Harlech.
The Snowdonia National Park Authority (SNPA) recently announced plans to build a barn to protect the bats, in anticipation of the building finally being torn down.
“Constructing the bat barn is an important part in the process of removing the eyesore that is the derelict hotel.
“We will continue to pursue the issue of demolition, but there are still significant constraints to overcome – with financing the work being the primary issue,” said Jonathan Cawley, director of planning and land management at the SNPA.
There has been a long-running dispute between SNPA and the owners of the land, Aitchison Associates, a Gibraltar-based company that has paid over £20,000 in fines for failing to demolish the building or develop the site.
The SNPA is now trying to find the funds to demolish the hotel itself.
Planning permission was granted in 2009 to knock down St David’s and replace it with a 130-bedroom hotel and 76 holiday apartments. To date nothing has happened at the site.
Jane Jones, SNPA’s principal planning officer, said: “The authority has been inundated with complaints from local residents and visitors to Harlech about the poor condition of the hotel building and how its unsightly appearance seriously detracts from the surrounding vicinity.”
The building was designed by Scottish architect George Henry Walton, one of the most famous architects in early 20th Century Europe.
Walton studied at the Glasgow School with Charles Rennie Mackintosh, designer of the Glasgow School of Art that was tragically destroyed by fire last year for a second time.
St David’s Hotel itself was gutted by fire in 1922. The original plans for the building were destroyed in the fire, so many of the original features were lost when it was rebuilt.
