Meliá Hotels International, S.A. (formerly Sol Meliá) is a Spanish hotel chain which was founded by Gabriel Escarrer Juliá in 1956 in Palma de Mallorca. The company is the world's largest operator of holiday resorts and the 13th biggest hotel chain worldwide. Domestically the company is the market leader in both resort and urban hotels. Currently Sol Meliá operates around 300 hotels in 27 countries worldwide, employing almost 17,000 people.

The origins of the company reach back to 1956, when the then-21-year-old Gabriel Escarrer Juliá leased the Altair Hotel in Palma, Majorca. Over the subsequent years Escarrer took advantage of the island's increasing popularity as a tourist destination for package holidaymakers, adding further properties to the portfolio of his company, Hoteles Mallorquines. The company expanded geographically in the 1960s and 70s, acquiring hotels in the Canaries as well as the other Balearic Islands. After the decline of General Franco's dictatorship, tourism in Spain developed more rapidly and Hoteles Mallorquines aggressively moved onto the Spanish mainland, establishing a presence in much of the country by the early 1980s.