I discovered something genuinely unusual in Shenzhen.
Something old.
Not old old, obviously. This is Shenzhen, a city that has gone from fishing villages to gleaming metropolis in roughly the time it takes London to approve a planning application. Almost everything here is new, shiny, ambitious and faintly terrifying.
And then there is the InterContinental Shenzhen.
Somehow, this hotel missed the memo.
It feels less like a hotel in Shenzhen and more like somewhere you might find in Kensington in 1987, specifically designed to trap American tourists who have wandered in from a nearby coach and are looking for somewhere to spend their dollars.
But the oddity doesn’t end there.
Because, for absolutely no discernible reason, the InterContinental Shenzhen has decided it is in Spain.
Not Spain as anyone in Spain might recognise it, obviously. Spain as imagined by somebody who once had a holiday in Benidorm and watched Bullseye.
Bulls everywhere? Tick.
Doormen dressed as matadors? Tick.
A gigantic Spanish galleon sitting on the roof? Oh, absolutely.
It is, frankly, so committed to the Spanish theme that I half expected a man called Antonio to emerge from reception carrying a tray of sangria and shouting “Olé!”
Honestly, even Las Vegas would look at this level of cultural appropriation and say, “Steady on.”
And you might forgive all this if the hotel itself were fabulous. If, beneath the ridiculousness, there were some magnificent old-world glamour. Some faded grandeur. Some sense that you had stumbled upon a magnificent relic from another era.
But no.
It’s just a bit rubbish.
The lifts, for example, are extraordinarily slow. The wait for a lift from the lobby to the second floor is approximately the length of the Spanish Civil War. You start in a functioning democracy and by the time the doors open you’ve lived through a dictatorship and are wondering where Franco has parked.
Then there is room 2040.
Getting to room 2040 is less a journey through a hotel than an expedition. It is, frankly, the equivalent of a stage of the Vuelta a España. By the time you arrive you are expecting someone to hand you a water bottle and check your heart rate.
And then you get there.
The room is dated in that very particular way where you can almost hear the furniture saying, “We were quite something in 1994.”
There is a sunken bath beside the window, which sounds rather glamorous until you see it, at which point it becomes clear that it is less luxury spa and more bathroom in a provincial nightclub. The white plastic has turned yellow with age, presumably having given up on life some considerable time ago.
And then there is the smell.
My room was supposedly non-smoking. Which is interesting, because it smelled rather strongly of Benson & Hedges circa 1982. You know the smell: the ghost of a cigarette smoked by a middle manager in a brown suit, sometime during the Thatcher administration.
Breakfast is underwhelming. The bar is slow and uninspiring. And everywhere you look there is this strange sense that the hotel is living in a completely different decade to the city outside.
Which is the real shame.
Because Shenzhen is extraordinary. It is vibrant, modern, exciting and slightly bonkers in exactly the right way. It is a city that looks forward. It is a city that seems to have decided that tomorrow is going to be better than today and has built accordingly.
The InterContinental, meanwhile, appears to have been told about tomorrow but decided not to attend.
How InterContinental has allowed its name to be attached to this place is, frankly, baffling.
There is something almost charming about a hotel being eccentric. I rather like a bit of weirdness. But eccentricity only works when there is something underneath it. Here, the Spanish galleon, the matadors and the bulls feel less like character and more like a desperate attempt to distract you from the fact that the whole thing needs a very large renovation cheque.
The InterContinental Shenzhen is a hotel that has wandered into the wrong city, dressed in the wrong clothes and stubbornly refused to change.
And in a city moving this fast, it really ought to be told:
You’re not dressed for Shenzhen.
Go home.
Change.
Come back when you’ve caught up.
For context, I was here as a business traveller, which probably matters. This is very much a family hotel, with the pools and all the Spanish-themed nonsense presumably going down a storm with children. Kids may well love Spain. But unless you’re here with little ones, I’d probably avoid it.
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