Hotel Glória — Glória, Rio de Janeiro

About the building

The Hotel Glória is the white palace that dominates the Glória hillside above Rua do Russel, built for the 1922 International Exhibition marking Brazil's independence centenary. Joseph Gire — architect of the Copacabana Palace — designed it with the German Sylvio Riedlinger, and it opened on 15 August 1922 as Brazil's first five-star hotel, counted among the first large reinforced-concrete buildings in South America.

After closing as a hotel in the 2000s and sitting through a long, well-publicized abandonment, the building has been converted to residential use as the Glória Residencial — which puts one of the city's most famous addresses back on the housing market, directly above the Glória metro and the marina.

Address: Rua do Russel 632, Glória, Rio de Janeiro

History

Commissioned by the Rocha Miranda family for the 1922 centenary exhibition, the hotel was built to give Rio a grand European-style establishment in the manner of the French Riviera, with banquet halls, a theater and 150 rooms in its original configuration. Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe and Neil Armstrong all stayed here, and for decades it shared with the Copacabana Palace the role of official address for visiting heads of state.

The hotel closed in 2008 after being sold for an ambitious renovation that stalled, and the building deteriorated for over a decade before its conversion into a residential development — one of the largest heritage retrofits in the South Zone.