Spanish Hotel's Stress Release

A few lucky people in need of a stress break were offered the ultimate, if unconventional, therapy.

A Spanish hotel chain planning renovations at one of its Madrid locations offered 30 "highly stressed out people," selected by a team of psychologists, the chance to take up sledge hammers and battering rams and rampage through the its rooms on Tuesday.

And rampage they did.

Wearing protective dust masks, goggles, white overalls, helmets and gloves, the amateur demolition crew swung hammers into television sets and bedroom walls and tossed beds and desks like hard-partying rock stars.

In their wake they left a trail of splintered debris in rooms that not long before had hosted traveling salesmen and tourists.

The NH Alcala hotel in Madrid, part of a chain of 335 hotels on three continents, said it decided to forgo hiring professionals and let selected customers carry out the facelift, and in so doing generate a bit of headline-making publicity.

"Who hasn't dreamed, in the middle of a stress attack, of breaking everything around them?" NH hotels said in a statement.

The hotel's marketing department admitted the idea did not originate from them but from customers who wanted to participate in NH's remodeling plans for the Alcala hotel, even "offering to destroy the furniture," reports the Spanish daily El Pais.

"After a few blows comes exhaustion and with it the release of pain-relieving endorphins which make us feel much better," said psychologist Laura Garcia Agustin.

Despite having been inaugurated as recently as 1996, the hotel's interior looked dated and dowdy, hotel executives said, more 1970s than new millennium. Facing the capital's large Retiro park in the exclusive Salamanca district, the hotel was clearly lagging behind in modern Madrid.

Those involved in the stress-relieving demolition will be invited back to admire the establishment's new interior at an event in September, the chain said.