THAT STORY about the Spanish skycraper, the tallest residential building in the EU whose builders forgot the elevator? Another hoax. (yes, I fell for it too  — the drawback of blogging too fast)

Twitter pal @jamoral alerted me that not only the builders flatly denied it but, more importantly, that back in April — that is, well before the controversy erupted — a journalist explained on his blog (link in Spanish) how he went all the way up in the elevators. He even got pictures:

(partially covered for protection during construction)

The building is ugly as hell, to be sure, but it does have elevators. It's got not one, not two — it's got eleven: 3 in each of the towers (two of them high capacity for lifting furniture), plus 4 for the penthouses on top, plus a panoramic one on the outside. It takes less than one minute to ride on them from bottom to top.

The hoax seems to come from a bad translation by Gizmodo of a somewhat confusing article in the Spanish daily El País which only touches the elevator issue tangentially (it's basically about chaos in the building planning), but that doesn't really say that the building lacks elevators. The original El Pais piece was taken by a Spanish Kinja contributor, with a very slanted take, picked by Gizmodo, and from there to the stratosphere...

I'm told that several American TV crews (CNN, CBS etc) arrived yesterday in Benidorm to cover the story. If so, the trip's gonna be wasted...