If we had know the history of the bar we wouldn't have touched it with a barge pole !
It only started to come out as we were do it up and working hard.
Lets start at the beginning, not all this information had come out to us before opening but by the time we closed, we had been told the same story, many times from many different people !
It all started as an ancient olive grove, with one lonely fig tree in it ! The town hall was given the land by a local gentleman in the small hamlet of Los Zoilos to build a road from the hamlet to Serón village. What had happened was the road was built in a slightly different place and the town hall used the land to build the swimming pool, they also managed to get the adjoining land and built a football pitch and sports centre, making it a really lovely area. Although the family of the former land owner are still slightly miffed by what happened over thirty years before !
The pool itself started off much as it is today, a large pool and a small pool, with changing rooms. I am told it was one of the first, if not the first municipal pool in the Almanzora Valley. The bar however had started life for the first year or so, as little more than a small kiosks.
They rebuilt the bar to pretty much how it remains today.
What we hadn't known was that a string of people over the years had the bar, also it was only opened for the two months the pool was open. The most successful bar and night bar owners in the village had only kept it open for one season because it didn't make enough money !
It had been a steak house, and for many years had had to be opened by town hall staff because no one else would take it on. The last people to have it had not helped the reputation. Maria and Antonio who we would later get to meet and would leave a unique impression on us, had not been the cleanest of people ! The ladies toilet by the end of the summer had a knee high pile of fag butts behind the door, I never saw this but it doesn't surprise me !
They also had a drink problem and would often not turn up at all. People never knew if they would be able to get tapas ( sure if they had seen the kitchen when we went in,they wouldn't have wanted any !) or even if they would be open! All in all they left the pool bar with a really bad reputation.
Oh, great, now we find out !
Along with all of this we were told the area flooded every 25 years and was due a big flood ! Great !
We are opening a bar in a country we don't speak the language, which will only survive if we have local support and Spanish holiday makers support and we choose a bar with this sort of reputation !!
On the other side of the coin we had been told by a few that during the pool opening it had been a gold mine and one guy said the summer he ran it, it had taken a lot of money. We now had to work towards bring that period back and carrying the good times through to the rest of the year. As determined people, with a vision, we would be going to all out to make it work !
We changed the bars name to 'Sam's Bar' after much discussion, we thought as I was already well known in the town, people would know it was us if we used my name, it worked to a degree !
We had redecorated and planted flowers, so hopefully people could easily see it was different.
We advertised and put posters everywhere!
All that was left to do was to do our best and how all would turn out right !
Fingers crossed for the Grand Opening !!!