Resort with a past.

• Author: Stalker, Ian
• Position: Ojo!

NICARAGUA'S BARCELO Playa Montelimar Resort & Casino is a tourist retreat that, if not fit for a king, was at least suited for a dictator who became fabulously wealthy by dipping his hands into seemingly every aspect of the Central American nation's till during the twelve years that he ruled it.

The 290-unit, all-inclusive Pacific coast resort is on the estate that once served as a summer retreat for deposed dictator Anastasio Somoza, who became synonymous with greed--partly thanks to his pocketing international financial aid sent to Nicaragua after its capital of Managua was devastated by an earthquake in 1972--and Latin American dictatorship during his ruthless tenure. Somoza was finally forced to flee Nicaragua in the face of advancing Sandinista revolutionaries, ending up in Paraguay, where he was eventually assassinated.

After the Nicaraguan revolution, the Sandinistas nationalized Somoza holdings, including Montelimar, which was fully developed as a resort in the 1980s by the Nicaraguan government and Italian investors at a cost of $25 million and then privatized by an elected government that replaced the Sandinistas in 1990. In 1992, it became part of Spain's Barcelo Hotels & Resorts hotel chain, which bills 520-acre Montelimar as a five-star property.

The resort, which faces seven miles of beach, now forms the cornerstone of Nicaragua's somewhat fledgling tourist trade and can give visitors a look at the life-styles of the rich and the infamous, says local guide Juan Carlos Mendoza. "It's interesting to stay in a place that was owned by a dictator," he says. "It's part of the history of Nicaragua."

The only Montelimar structure still standing from the Somoza em is El Ranchon, built by Somoza for his...