Club Hotel de la Ventana

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Club Hotel de la Ventana was a large, luxurious hotel resort, built by the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway and opened in 1911 near Villa Ventana, 17 km from the small town of Sierra de La Ventana, in the southeast of the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

[edit] History

The resort was designed by the Italian architect Antonio Gherardi, who also designed the customs house in the nearby city of Bahia Blanca. Construction began in 1904 with bricks especially produced nearby by the empresario Ernesto Tornquist, a local resident. The Hotel had a luxurious interior and rivalled the best hotels in the world at that time. It could accommodate 350 guests and had 173 rooms and four large suites. Features included a solarium, a restaurant decorated in Louis XVI style, a winter garden, a ballroom with 150 seats were films could be shown, three casino halls, a night club, two beauty salons, a tower with a panoramic view over the surrounding mountains, a concert hall, a well-stocked library, an 18-hole golf course, a football pitch and three tennis courts. There was also a riding stable, a swimming pool, a hospital, a pharmacy, a hair dresser, and a large gymnasium. The resort was set in a park of 126 ha. designed by the French-born Argentine architect and landscape designer Carlos Thays who included a wide variety of European trees.

The inauguration on 11 November 1911, which included a Catholic Mass and a banquet, was attended by 1200 distinguished guests including the British Ambassador and the President of Argentina, Julio Argentino Roca, who described the Hotel as "The marvel of the century". A narrow gauge railway line, built to connect the resort to the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway station in Sierra de la Ventana, was opened on 17 December 1913, and there was a daily connecting service to and from Estación Constitución in Buenos Aires.

The resort began to suffer large losses from 1913 onwards due to the world economic depression and the outbreak of war in Europe. In spite of this, however, a large celebration was held here on 9 July 1916 to mark the centenary of the Argentine Declaration of Independence. Guests included the Spanish Infanta Isabel de Borbon, the Prince of Wales later to become King Edward VIII, the Brazilian President Hermes Rodrigues da Fonseca, and many politicians and diplomats of the highest level.

On 3 November 1917 gambling was prohibited in Argentina by presidential decree. Three years later in 1920 the mostly English owners of the resort decided to close it, and the company they had set up to manage the resort went into liquidation. On 30 November 1924 the Provincial government took over the Hotel with a plan to use it as a holiday centre for students, teachers and their families, a plan that was never put into action. Later the Hotel was looted, with everything from fine wines in the wine cellar to the valuable furniture disappearing,

At the start of the Second World War in 1939, the Battle of the River Plate, involving the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee and the British cruisers Exeter, Achilles and Ajax, ended with the captain of the Graf Spee, Hans Langsdorff, scuttling his ship in the harbour of Montevideo in Uruguay. On 22 December 1939 over 1,000 sailors from the Graf Spee were taken to Buenos Aires, and some of them were later interned by the government in the Hotel until 1946. For a brief period the hotel came to life again and some restoration work was carried out.

With the return of the crew to Germany the Hotel fell into disrepair and eventually in 1978 demolition began. On 8 July 1983 a fire destroyed most of the remaining hotel and today the site lies in ruins.