Our History
Today’s HOTEL MARITIMO obtained its name in 1978. The year in which it was sold by its old owner, its name was inherited and has been unchanged until present day. Its first opening was in 1915 as Pension Miramar, and its founder was the Alicante-born Juan Pastor Sevilla, who began this project when he was 40 years of age. Juan Pastor (who had already managed another hostel establishment in the Rambla since 1915) acquired the house of 42 San Fernando Street, 13 Valdes Street and 2 Santiago Street and added 4 floors, creating the structure we still have to this day. In the top floor there lived a large family, with 7 children, and on the roof terrace they had the laundry, ironing room and clothes lines. The ground floor locale was a grocery shop and it sold everything from oil and tinned products to beans and salted goods.
From 2004 it is under the ownership of the Garcia Velasco family, who have been renovating and reforming the rooms and the furnishings ever since. In 2018 they decided to radically reform the facade front, changing its colour and adding the decorations to integrate it with the Palaces surrounding it, consolidating itself in the charming city centre, respecting the 104-year heritage of the establishment. It is currently the oldest running hotel in the city and has been awarded the title of a Historical Heritage site, whilst also being a pioneer in the tourism industry of the Comunitat Valenciana.
In 1915 Juan Pastor Sevilla, a San Juan local married to Agueda Catalan Hernandez, opened a Hotel establishment in Alicante, the Miramar Pension, located in Jorge Juan Street, although in the well-researched book of Posadas, Fondas y Hoteles en el Alicante del Siglo XIX y primera mitad del XX, edited by the Alicante Culture Institute Juan Gil-Albert, the conscientious investigator Caridad Valdes Chapuli upgrades its category to Hotel Miramar and places it at 15 Gravina Street, opposite the now non-existent Central Market of the docks.
Conjuring up old family confessions, his grandson, the Alicantine artist Javier Pastor Millet jogs his memory and reveals the exact location “It was next to the staircase of Saint Mary, very close to the new pension, El Mar”. He also remembers his predecessor’s activities “he owned horses and carts, which he would rent out for business and workers at the port. He would keep the horses and carts in the storerooms in the arches beneath the church.”
The grandfather Pastor Sevilla maintained the pension until 1928, during which his position improved and he moved to 19 The Rambla, “the main road of the city”. There, next to the defunct convent of the Religious Capuchin Fransicans, he established his own modern business, the Pastor Hotel, “with central heating and hot water” advertised and which “in 1933 would have important renovations” according to Caridad Valdes.
At the end of the Spanish war, he was substituted by his trusted son, Juan Pastor Catalan, a multifaceted character, who would have the hotel expropriated by the new bureaucratic regime with the excuse that the local would be used in the construction of the new headquarters for the Bank of Spain, which would later take the place of the previously mentioned defunct Convent, which had been burnt and ransacked on the 11th of May 1931 by a fanatical anti-religious group. Juan Pastor’s complaints in Madrid were not productive. After his frustrated return, he moved with his wife and proletariats to a house in L’Albufereta, the property of friends.
After the demolition of the building on the Rambla and an enforced break, Juan Pastor Catalan would reopen the hotel in 1946, using a site with the main entrance on 10 Valdes Street and with access from 42 San Fernando. Juan, an Alicante local born on the 5th of May 1906, married Josefa Millet Vazquez, daughter of Augustin Millet, mason and founder of the Logia Constante Alona.
Josefa was a teacher during the Spanish Republic based in Callosa de Segura, and was punished for this. However, they raised seven children: Agueda, Juan, Maria Jose, Agustin, Maria, Antonio and Javier, the painter and youngest child. They are all still alive and well, all homebirths except the last one. Javier remembers her, with a wave of emotions, “my mother was an excellent person, a liberal republican who would attend cultural institutions such as the Ateneo. We have a portrait of her at home, painted by Emilio Varela. She was beautiful.” He was also forthright about his father, “He was a gentleman and a keen boxer. All the girls would fall in love with him. He was a great man, generous and athletic”.
