Atlantico is a vast buffet inside the Lopesan Costa Meloneras Resort Spa and Casino in Gran Canaria. The Lopesan Costa Melonoras Resort Spa and Casino — or, as I will henceforth call it, TLCMRSAC — looks like Citizen Kane’s Xanadu without the art, the metaphor or the tragedy. It has towers, chandeliers, vistas, pools, terraces, tennis courts, a swim-up bar, a miniature golf course and palm trees. It is a synthetic paradise for Europeans who want sun in November in their own time zone; it is more unnatural than Las Vegas.
Atlantico has roughly one thousand covers, if you include an annexe room styled like an Egyptian tomb with a coffee machine, and an annexe terrace. (Each terrace has its own familiar, or cat.) It is painted in shades of generic blue, for the ocean I suppose, nearby but unvisited, for the sand is black, and the waves are unfriendly. There are legions of white-clothed tables; a striped floor; odd white tubes as decor, sprouting from the floor; kindly, excitable waiters and almost no natural light.
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