Zero in Zanzibar

Sun, wind and… tourists to power luxury hotel

Make way for the world’s first five-star zero-carbon hotel. Its well-heeled guests will be taking showers heated by the sun, swimming in a pool fed with rainwater and generating electricity in the gym.

Unfortunately, it’ll be a plane ride away for most holidaymakers – either in Zanzibar, Mauritius or Brazil, once luxury resort owners Per Aquum give the go-ahead to architect Richard Hywel Evans’s pioneering plans. But its green credentials will go some way towards offsetting the flight.

Once completed at the end of 2008, the 35-villa complex is to be powered by wind turbines and solar photovoltaics. It will also feature water pipes that cool the beds and a novel air-conditioning system where the shape of the walls channel sea breezes across the swimming pool to cool them. A solar-powered desalinisation plant will draw water from the ocean, eventually to be cleaned through the waste water reed-bed filtered system. To top it all off, the kitchen’s ovens and water will be heated by foil reflectors that concentrate the sun’s rays.

 “This resort should set the company apart from others in the field,” says Hywel Evans. “It’s taken a year to come up with a viable but visionary plan, but Per Aquum is really taken with it now, and is looking at refurbishing its other resorts along the same lines.” – Hannah Bullock

11 March 2007

Hannah Bullock