Rio’s Famed Hotel Glória Faces Potential Demolition

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – One of the few remaining art deco jewels from Rio de Janeiro’s golden age, the Hotel Glória provided elegant urban sanctuary for movie stars, singers, politicians and heads of state, for over 80 years. However, now effectively abandoned for more than a decade, it seems as if this landmark’s days are numbered.

Reports reveal that a recent engineering survey organized by Rio’s City Hall concluded that it would be better to implode the property than invest in long-delayed renovation plans. It remains unclear if or when this implosion would take place, but the building’s future is now in serious jeopardy.

Designed by French architect Joseph Gire, who subsequently designed the Copacabana Palace, the Hotel Glória was built by entrepreneur Rocha Miranda specifically for Brazil’s 1922 International Exhibition – held in Rio to commemorate the centennial of national independence.

Erected with the aid of German engineers, the Hotel Glória was reputedly one of the first reinforced concrete buildings to be built in South America. Originally containing 180 rooms and a casino (closed in 1946 when gambling was prohibited), spectacular ballrooms, a theatre, and recreation areas, each room offered guests both a bathroom and a telephone.

The hotel was subsequently expanded, ultimately to about 630 rooms, and furnished with a swimming pool, a steam sauna, conference facilities, and a heliport. Unhappily, as the accompanying photographs reveal, such amenities have long since been destroyed, and now only the once graceful façade remains intact.

In fact, the hotel has been steadily deteriorating since 2008 when, after 86 years of continuous activity, it was purchased by the property arm of Brazilian Eike Batista’s EBX group for R$80 (US$20) million.

Batista promptly closed the hotel and gutted the interior in order to realize his stated desire to restore the building’s “1920s charm” and simultaneously transform it into a world-class luxury facility.

The now-disgraced local businessman’s typically grandiose and flamboyant ambitions were, however, dramatically derailed by shifts in the commodities and precious metals markets and, ultimately, convictions for bribery as part of the Lava Jato corruption investigations.

In 2010 the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) announced an R$146.5 million finance package under the “ProCopa Turismo” funding initiative aimed at supporting projects proposed for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Unfortunately, Batista’s EBX energy and mining conglomerate was already in trouble and, following “historic losses,” Batista and his business empire filed for bankruptcy in 2013.

After an aborted attempt to sell the building to the Swiss investment fund, Acron AG, the Hotel Gloria was ultimately surrendered to the Mubadala Investment Company, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund (a state-owned investment vehicle for the United Arab Emirates), as part of the dissolution of EBX. It is unclear what value was assigned to the transaction, but the building has lain abandoned and derelict ever since.

At this point, it looks as if one more symbolic link to Rio de Janeiro’s glamorous golden age is about to be severed. The hotel, long maintained as a family business (by Eduardo Tapajós and his heirs), became collateral damage in the fallout from a billionaire’s hubristic overreach.

Given the city’s current economic and financial climate, it is hard to see how this elegant but crumbling remnant of Glória – and Rio’s – heyday will survive.

Constructed in the Roaring ‘20s as part of an elaborate tribute to the ‘country of the future,’ the Hotel Glória may meet its ultimate end, a century later, in far less optimistic times.