Tropical Hotel, in Manaus, gets reopening date – 03/02/2024 – Tourism

The Tropical Hotel, which for decades was the largest and most luxurious hotel in Manaus, recently gained a new reopening date: December 31st of this year. Closed since 2019, when it went bankrupt, the complex was auctioned the following year for R$91 million. The renovation began in 2021.

When reopened, Tropical will have 580 rooms of different categories, a gym, a signature spa, two large swimming pools, five restaurants and a convention center. In addition to restoring the luxury of the development, the renovation will also bring new features, such as a marina and a strip of sand that will form a beach on the banks of the Rio Negro, a wild animal shelter center and an entire expography spread throughout the hotel, dedicated to their memory.

The successful bidder for the complex, responsible for administration in this new phase, is the Fametro Group, a large educational group, owner of the Fametro University Center. Dean of the college, lawyer Maria do Carmo Seffair leads the project together with businessman Wellington Lins de Albuquerque. According to them, the renovation should cost around R$250 million.

“When we bought the hotel, we thought it could be a case of a simple retrofit. But when we started the works, we saw the size of the disaster. We discovered that it would be necessary to leave the hotel alone, and the retrofit became a big architectural restoration work”, recalls Seffair, who has already announced the reopening of Tropical twice, in 2022 and 2023.

“The pandemic also caused us to delay, as many factories started asking for more time than initially planned. Now, we are in the process of choosing the flag, which needs to bring its characteristics to the project, and thus, we are able to continue with the works. The most complex period has already passed”, explains the businesswoman. According to her, the number of beds that Tropical will make available should double the hotel capacity that Manaus currently has.

Opened in 1976 on the banks of the Negro River, where the Ponta Negra neighborhood is today, the Tropical had more than 600 rooms and, like the Hotel das Cataratas, in Foz do Iguaçu, was part of the Varig group. From the 1980s onwards, the collapse of the airline took with it the hotel’s golden era, which continued in operation – with little or no glamor until 2019, accumulating debts that reached around R$20 million.

At its height, Tropical had more than 600 rooms, including 300 m² presidential suites that hosted officials from Brazil and abroad (among them, Bill Clinton and the then Prince Charles, of the United Kingdom), artists and personalities such as Glória Gaynor, the band Scorpios and Nobel Prize winner for literature Gabriel Garcia Marquez. There was even a zoo inside the complex, which to this day, even though it is deactivated, still houses Manoel, the largest jaguar in captivity in the country — a biologist paid by the bankrupt estate took care of her and other animals during the period in which the hotel was closed.