The Most Sophisticated Hotels In The World

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

If your trips are on your wish list for the year that is about to start, be sure to include one more detail: visiting one or another spectacular hotel. And what if there are many of them!

Among the hotel extravagances is the Icehotel, which is in a nutshell the coldest hotel in the world. As it is built on ice snow, this work of art only operates in the winter season. It remains in Jukkasjärvi, a small town in the north of Sweden that barely has 1,100 residents who, in the winter, have to prepare to receive the more than 50,000 visitors from all over the world who are fascinated to see their unique accommodation.

The Icehotel is built with 1,000 tons of ice from the Torne River and 30,000 tons of 'snice', a mixture of snow and ice that strengthens the structure. Every season about 100 people get involved in its construction, half of whom are artists who design specific areas.

If cold isn't your thing, then travel to Africa and stay at the Giraffe Manor is a 12-acre hotel on private land within 140 acres of indigenous forest in a Nairobi suburb. Its extraordinary appeal dates back to the 1930s when European visitors first flocked to East Africa to enjoy their safaris. Whoever visits it feels like inside a movie, and with good reason.

However, the most fascinating thing about Giraffe Manor is its herd of resident Rothschild giraffes who can visit guests at any time of day, tucking their long necks in windows in hopes of receiving a snack, before retiring to their forest sanctuary.

But if you like art, then the Dolder Grand, in Switzerland, is a hotel-museum where boredom is unknown. From its pretty hill overlooking the Alps, Lake Zurich and the city, the Dolder Grand is home to 124 works of art. Starting with Andy Warhol's Big Retrospective Painting with his imposing 11-meter presence in the reception area, up to Fernando Botero's enormous Women With Fruit in his gardens and samples by Joan Miró and other great masters displayed in his surroundings … So they don't get lost Not a single detail guests are given an iPad with the tour of this collection.

In case you want to surround yourself with books, in Óbidos, Portugal, there is a beautiful hotel called The Literary Man, a real mecca for lovers of literature. In addition to a first class accommodation, it has a collection of 50,000 books!

In Miami, one of the most extravagant hotels even has its own "cathedral" instead of a lobby. It is the Faena, where after passing its long white glass doors one meets a huge 30-foot long red carpet that takes one to the spacious lobby lined with huge columns of gold and golden skyscrapers that will make you feel in a kind of very peculiar church: enormous tropical murals that go from the ground have been painted on its walls instead of angels.

So that the extravagance is not limited to its interior, in the heart of its garden, between the beach and the pool, is the enormous skeleton of a three-meter-tall mammoth bathed in 24-carat gold. The sculpture is called Gone but not Forgotten, and was made by artist Damian Hirst. To add drama to the scene, his work is placed in a huge glass box with gold edges and surrounded by palm trees. To preserve this piece of art in the heat and humidity of the city, an air conditioning system always maintains the same temperature. It is that in the Faena, all the angles of luxury and exuberance have been covered,