Foz: How is Hotel das Cataratas, elected the best in Brazil – 03/10/2023 – Tourism

Nine Brazilian hotels feature in the most recent edition of the Forbes Travel Guide, the travel guide of the American publication that annually chooses the best properties around the world. Among the 558 best five stars on the list, the only one from South America is the Hotel das Cataratas, located inside the Iguaçu National Park —which appears in the ranking for the sixth consecutive year.

Since 2007 under the umbrella of the luxury Belmond group (which also designs the Copacabana Palace, in Rio de Janeiro, and invested US$ 20 million in a major renovation), the hotel has drawn the attention of Forbes for its colonial charm and spa with native Brazilian products. But, mainly, for the access that its guests have to the falls.

“Tourists in general must leave the park every day, which means that at dawn and dusk, guests have the falls all to themselves,” highlights the magazine’s assessment. “You can walk to Devil’s Throat, surrounded by the spray of the falls, with only the local wildlife for company even before the first tourists of the day enter the park.”

This more than privileged access to the Iguaçu National Park, a natural world heritage site by Unesco, is exclusive to the Brazilian side —the Argentines even have a hotel there, but without the same experience of contemplation— and the result of the sensitivity of the architect from Minas Gerais Angel Murgel. An employee of the forest service of the Ministry of Agriculture in the late 1930s, he was responsible for designing the buildings of the various national parks then created by Getúlio Vargas.

The Hotel das Cataratas project was conceived at the same time that national modernist architecture was giving its first fruits (such as the Ministry of Education, designed by Lúcio Costa in Rio de Janeiro). Even so, Murgel opted for a colonial language, which at the time sounded dated, but today composes the charm that conquers even those who are just passing through, on their way to the falls.

In his doctoral thesis, the architect explains that he sought “the simplicity and naturalness with which man in his most primitive stages has always solved the problem of his dwellings. For him, “only the essential, in terms of materials, should be brought from outside, considering that the main components for constructions were obtained ‘in loco’, making use of regional resources and applying them in order to obtain the maximum effect”.

Professor at UFJF’s Faculty of Urbanism Architecture, architect Fábio José Martins de Lima explains in his doctoral thesis that the set of buildings that make up the national parks of Iguaçu and Itatiaia, in Rio de Janeiro (also signed by the miner) , favored, above all, interactions with nature.

In Foz, in addition to the hotel, Murgel also designed the park’s administrative headquarters, the director’s residence and the first local airport, opened in 1941, in the midst of World War II. Moves towards the construction of the hotel only started in the 1950s, partly as a result of the ban on gambling, which closed the Hotel Cassino, until then the only one worthy of the wealthy tourists who appeared there.

Eight years later, in 1958, the Hotel das Cataratas finally opened its doors. Initially, under the responsibility of a national hotel company that soon gave up the operation, then taken over by Real Transportes Aéreos, an airline from São Paulo acquired by Varig shortly thereafter. Rede Tropical de Hotéis, the airline’s hospitality division, managed the hotel until 2007, when it was put out to tender again and taken over by the Belmond group.

In 2018, the entire Belmond chain was bought by the LVMH group, owner of Louis Vuitton, incorporating the management of the Hotel das Cataratas into the empire of Bernard Arnault, who in December 2022 surpassed Elon Musk and became the richest man in the world.

Currently, the Belmond Hotel das Cataratas has 187 suites, ranging from small apartments measuring 24 m² to the spacious Suite Cataratas (65 m²), with a living room and four balconies.

Guests also have a pool, bar, two restaurants, spa and, as the Forbes guide pointed out, “an excellent in-house travel office that organizes safari tours in the rainforest, bird watching, rafting and helicopter rides over the falls .”