Blackstone buys Cascade Wellness Resort

The asset management company Blackstone has notified the Portuguese competition authority that it has purchased the Cascade Wellness Resort in Lagos via a Luxembourg based subsidiary Magma Pledgeco.

According to a note sent to the Autoridade da Concorrência it has bought all of the shares of Cascadeinvest and Sunseasand, which held the resort’s assets, from Fliptrel Portugal.
The resort Cascade Wellness reopened in 2019 after having been repositioned, refurbished and extended in a project that took two years and €6 million of investment. Part of the works were financed by Portugal 2020.
Perched on the top of a cliff at Ponto da Piedade in Lagos, the 5-star resort is close to the Dona Ana beach. It has 108 rooms and suites (with areas of around 45m2), 58 apartments and 4 villas; three restaurants and two bars, as well as three pools, meeting rooms with a 500 person capacity, a 350m2 multi-use room and a kid’s club.
Clearly aimed at the wellness market, it has a spa with five treatment rooms, a heated pool, fully equipped gym and two tennis courts.
Blackstone has “shareholdings in several companies in Portugal, including those involved in construction materials, software development, environmental services, educational content, GPL, energy, optical industry, insurance, technology and hotels in the Algarve region, namely running the Domes Lake Algarve, which Blackstone bought in 2017.
The Cascade Wellness Resort is the third hotel offloaded by Fliptrel this year. In June, Capital Elements, which is part of the British Arrow Global group, bought Grande Buganvília – Projectos e Actividades Hoteleiras e Imobiliárias Turísticas, S.A., which was part of the Fliptrel Portugal S.A, which is turn is held in Portugal by the US asset management company Davidson Kempner.
Grande Buganvíla has two hotels in the Algarve, the Hilton Vilamoura – Cascatas Golf Resort & SPA and Vilamoura Garden.