What really makes the Copacabana Palace, with its five stars, 100-year history full of bizarre and glamorous anecdotes, special is how pleasant it is to chat about O Fenômeno – Ronaldo -, Gaúcho – over breakfast with Luiz Filipe Ribeiro. Ronaldinho – or the new sensation of Brazilian football, Endrick. What makes this exclusive accommodation special, first of all, is its least exclusive: the Rio essence that is lavish, that spreads everywhere in Rio de Janeiro and that cannot be packaged as a product or sold as an experience. . This is: the sunny joy, the golden and broad spirit of the young waiter Luiz Filipe Ribeiro when he stands in front of the umpteenth badge about football, when he explains to you how to make the tapioca roll that you are trying: this is the first. And then everything else.
“Since it opened, this has been a hotel where people feel comfortable,” writes Copacabana Palace author Francisca Matteoli via email. Where Rio Starts (Vendome Press, 2023), a book with a beautiful photographic representation. It doesn't mean that people feel important or unique or like they are in heaven. He says something that's elusive for such an expensive place: “People feel good.” He argues that the Copa – for friends – should not be valued as a strict material luxury. “For me it is a question of charm, that eternal thing that gets better with time and is passed down from generation to generation, as is the case with my family, who have been visiting the hotel since it opened in 1923. I know Rio and the hotel well. and the human quality I encounter here never ceases to amaze me.”
Now everything else.
Let's see.
Everything else can consist of drinking a bottle of champagne in the semi-Olympic pool – “our legendary pool”, as they say at Copacabana; “legendary”, always in front of the “swimming pool” – where Lady Di swam alone early one morning in 1991 while Prince Charles enjoyed the Amazon River a continent away, or where Janis Joplin in 1970, months before she overdosed in Los Angeles Heroin died In Angeles, she allegedly went in naked and was allegedly “invited to leave the hotel,” according to Copacabana Palace. A Hotel and its History (DBA, 2009), chronicle of the journalist Ricardo Boechat (1952-2019).
Exterior view of the building with 119 rooms and 101 suites. The facade was recently restored. Luisa Dörr
The hotel lobby. Luisa Dörr
So everything else can be drinking champagne in the legendary pool and the bottle is a Brazilian bottle for around 40 euros or a French one for 1,200, just as everything else can be an overnight stay for 500 euros or 7,000. This year, the hotel's suites were recognized as the best in South America at the World Travel Awards. And regardless of the room category, every customer is provided with a careful “pillow selection” with options such as the “relaxation pillow with chamomile aroma” or the “aloe vera pillow with regenerative technology”.
The pillows are convenient for waking up rested, opening the windows and seeing the Copacabana beach at your feet, while the atmosphere of warm, fragrant air, filled with the salty sea, the dirty city, the tropics, suddenly suffocates you, yours Face. into the vast blue expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. One could say that this is not part of everything else, but of the first, of the public and universal of Rio de Janeiro, of the same as the golden and broad spirit of Luiz Filipe Ribeiro, who, by the way, was present in the Copa for a decade. , started in cleaning, settled down as a waiter and is studying systems development analysis to specialize in the use of big data in luxury restaurants.
What is undoubtedly on top of everything else is demanding that the bed face the window so that one can stretch out between white sheets and watch the Brazilian sunrise, as the Ural dancer Rudolf Nureyev did in 1971; Ask about it and your wish will of course be fulfilled.
The director of the Copacabana Palace, Ulisses Marreiros.Luisa Dörr
His two Michelin-starred restaurants, the pan-Asian Mee and the Italian Cipriani, are everything else. The Pérgula restaurant, located next to the pool, serves a breakfast that deserves operatic applause for its viennoiserie, its Brazilian sweets, its cajá compote, its selection of honeys from different regions of the Republic, its sucos (juices), its fruits and abacaxi (pineapple ), Mamão (papaya), Melancia (watermelon), Melão (melon), their fruits that Albert of Monaco, one of his distinguished and loyal guests, loves so much. In Pérgula, Saturdays are feijoada days; In any case, what is missing is that the classic dishes of Brazilian popular culture do not have a more central presence in the gastronomic system of a national landmark such as the Copacabana Palace; Perhaps it would be worthwhile if at least one of the two top restaurants were dedicated to the new cuisine of Brazil, a country covering 8.5 million square kilometers whose Amazon rainforest represents, as Ferran Adrià said, “the final frontier of taste.” ” .
It could be a trace of the initial mentality of this hotel's gloss, which was outward-facing.
President Epitácio Pessoa wanted the then capital Rio to welcome its guests with spacious accommodation in 1922, the 100th anniversary of independence. The president brought Octávio Guinle, hotel owner and member of one of the country's largest family fortunes, into the project. Construction did not take place in time for the 100th anniversary. The opening was delayed until 1923 due to the size of the factory and the time required to obtain so many imported materials: Carrara marble, lamps from Czechoslovakia, French and Swedish furniture, English carpets, even the cement was imported from Germany . French architect Joseph Gire designed its eclectic façade in the style of the Carlton and Negresco, the Côte d'Azur hotels that had impressed President Pessoa on his trip to Europe to sign the Treaty of Versailles.
A quartz sculpture in a business corridor of the hotel.Luisa Dörr
One of the rooms, full of light, spacious and always with beautiful paintings or photographs of Rio, its landscapes, its biodiversity, prints that would look better with a more sober framing criterion. Luisa Dörr
It was an exaggerated idea to build this monumental Beaux-Arts building on Copacabana, which was just beginning to gain importance as a second home area and was far from the city center. It was an exaggerated idea. And it was a success that shaped today's Rio. As the journalist Maneco Müller (1923-2005) wrote in the prologue to Boechat's wonderful chronicle: “The old Copa is part of the history of Rio and even its geography. After all, it wasn't Copacabana Beach that made the hotel famous, but Copacabana Palace that made the beach famous.
Copacabana soon became a reference beyond Brazil. In 1933, when its multimillion-dollar casino was in operation and just ten years after the hotel's inauguration, Hollywood consecrated its worldwide image with Flying Down to Rio, the musical starring Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire and Dolores del Río Blanks from the Copa were made at RKO Studios in California.
“For me, the period of the hotel's greatest splendor was that of the golden age of travel, the era of adventure and discovery that lasted until the first decades of the last century,” says Francisca Matteoli. His favorite anecdote comes from the time in 1930 when his Chilean grandfather arrived at the hotel laden with suitcases and a group of fans mistook him for the actor Tyrone Power, who was expected to arrive at the same time. Far from rushing to clear up the misunderstanding, Matteoli's grandfather stopped to sign autographs. By this time the hotel was already a machine for producing literary episodes. What happened to President Washington Luís in 1928 was serious. According to Boechat, he tried to break into the suite of Yvonette Martin, a French woman with whom he had a romantic relationship, and she shot him in the stomach. The president was hospitalized and is said to have undergone appendicitis.
The Copacabana Palace pool, living history. Luisa Dörr
Detail of one of the rooms. Luisa Dörr
The Copa stories never end. Enough examples like Marlene Dietrich in the dressing room of the Golden Room, the hotel's concert hall, requesting an ice bucket full of sand from Copacabana Beach to urinate on, or Orson Welles throwing furniture out the window into the legendary pool – including his typewriter, According to some versions – after a telephone argument with his partner Dolores del Río or the fire in 1953, which caused great damage without Guinle losing his temper: While flames raged in one part of the complex, Princess Ragnhild's lavish luggage stood there from Norway ready in the lobby on time for the scheduled departure time. Guinle was a perfectionist who led a team of 1,400 people with great attention to detail. For example, his list of rules for employees says to avoid any criticism of the customer, “even indirectly,” or “never show, either by words or gestures, that you are aware of his eccentricities.”
Today the director of the Portuguese is Ulisses Marreiros, a moderate man of warm elegance who started working in a supermarket at the age of 15 and soon embarked on a career that took him from the base – “my first hotel in the south of Portugal”. “It was a three-star hotel with 1,380 rooms, number one in the region in selling beer and chips” – at a table in Cipriani, where, between exquisite appetizers and a breathtaking wine accompaniment, he states: “Hospitality is an anthropological experience, and even more in the luxury sector,” as he gestures to call a waiter to discreetly signal that he has to explain to a blonde and stocky guest that it’s not worth letting his champagne glass be filled to the brim. The price of the bottle served justified the intervention: “As you know, we are not in the milkshake business here.”
Marreiros warns that the guests' behavior is usually correct, but there are hardly any exceptions. They didn't have crises like the football game that star Rod Stewart organized in the presidential suite in 1977. Due to the damage caused by his Scottish football, the musician, like Joplin before him, was also – endearing euphemism – “invited to leave the hotel”. The Red Hot Chili Peppers hosted our visit. His presence was barely noticeable, drowning out the somewhat loud shouts of his troops during a brunch in quiet Pérgula.
The Pergula Restaurant. Luisa Dörr
Luisa Dörr
At dinner at Cipriani, the director briefly talks about the biggest changes in the hotel's history. Octávio Guinle died in 1968. He was succeeded by his wife, Mrs. Mariazinha, who inherited an anachronistic leadership model with crazy spending and competition with new five-star hotels in a Rio that, moreover, had been in decline since the capital was founded in the year 1960. This became Brasilia. She resisted the sale until, in 1989, she accepted the offer of James Sherwood, who integrated the Copacabana into his Orient Express group and then into Belmond, which was acquired in 2018 by LVMH, owner of what is now officially Copacabana Palace, A Belmond is called. Hotel, Rio de Janeiro.
Since Sherwood began work three decades ago, the renovation hasn't stopped. The most recent is the theater's reopening in 2022. It was closed for 27 years. It was renovated by the architect Ivan Rezende. “After the fire of 1953 and the subsequent reform, everything was lost. We had to do archaeological work to interpret what it had been like,” he explains. The result is a cubic space made from native woods with surface reliefs that help improve sound reflection and absorption. When the renovations were completed, Caetano Veloso came by one day for an interview. Impressed by the acoustics, the Mythos regretted not having the guitar with him: “Mas como é que eles me trazem aqui sem o meu violão!”
The architect Ivan Rezende renovated the Copacabana Palace Theater under his leadership and reopened it in 2022 after many years of abandonment. Luisa Dörr
The Copacabana continues to evolve while maintaining its essence, retaining its classicism and being modernized. It is a luxury hotel of the 21st century where ghosts live, formidable ghosts like Jorginho Guinle, nephew of Octávio, a playboy who served as a bridge to the stars of the United States and Europe, the Cicerone cousin of the hotel where he stayed lived, and carefully wasted. One day in 2004, when he was dying in the hospital, the old Jorginho gave the order to be moved “ao céu” to his suite 153 in the Copacabana Palace. He ordered a vanilla milkshake with caramel, had chicken stroganoff for dinner, a raspberry sorbet for dessert, and at dawn he died satisfied and ruined, golden and broad as the Rio soul.
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