Abandoned Kansai

The Lequio Resort Okinawa, to the net usually known as the Rekio Hotel thanks to the usual katakana transcription problems, is one of those countless hotel ruins you can find all over Japan and that most urban explorers only visit because nobody has torn them down yet. The most interesting thing I can say about the place is the fact that it was built in the 1970s during the Okinawan hotel boom and right in time for the Okinawan Ocean Expo in 1975 – like the *Nakagusuku Hotel Ruin*, the most amazing unfinished hotel I’ve ever seen. Unlike the Nakagusku Hotel the Lequio Resort was actually finished and opened, at least for a while. Nowadays it’s completely vandalized and gutted, almost as bare Okinawa’s all outshining haikyo further down south. Bare except for the impressive amount of graffiti – almost as plenty, but barely ever as good as at the *La Rainbow Hotel* in Okayama. Built halfway up a mountain overlooking a gorgeous bay the Rekio Hotel offered some stunning views and visitors should be very careful where their steps lead them, because the place is a death trap with barely any safety barriers. The elevator shaft was cracked open on every floor and the balconies had no railings, except for some low hanging ropes on some of them. The vandalized state and the exposed position of the hotel make it and everybody inside susceptible for the always present winds, so seriously: Be careful when you go there. If you go there, because there is really not much to see. My favourite part was the glasses shaped pool, now green, moldy and pretty disgusting. But overall *Michael* and I spent just about an hour at the Lequio Resort – which is a ridiculously short amount of time for a hotel of that size, considering that it took me more than 12 minutes to shoot a walking tour there. If the Rekio Hotel would have been one of my first explorations I’m sure it would have been an exciting adventure, but after seeing so many abandoned hotels it turned out to be barely more than a footnote in my (imaginary) haikyo book…

(Addendum 2012-07-19: It seems like “Lequio” was the Portuguese name for Okinawa when it was still the kingdom of Ryukyu – thanks to my dear colleague and regular reader Mayuko for that information!)

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