Qualla: Club Hotel de la Ventana

Club Hotel de la Ventana: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A former President of Argentina called it the marvel of the century, and on the night of 11 November 1911 he meant it. Julio Argentino Roca — who had served two presidential terms and remained one of Argentina's most powerful figures — stood among 1,200 distinguished guests, including a British ambassador, the President of Brazil, and a Prince of Wales, inside a hotel that had no business existing where it did. The Club Hotel de la Ventana rose from empty hills in the south of Buenos Aires Province, a Belle Époque palace of 173 rooms, three casino halls, a winter garden, an 18-hole golf course, and a restaurant for 600 done in Louis XVI style. Guests reached it by a private narrow-gauge railway run out into the wilderness. Within nine years it would close forever, and today the wind blows through its roofless shell.

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Club Hotel de la Ventana: A Palace Out of Nothing

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The numbers still astonish. Designed by the Italian architect Antonio Gherardi, who had also built the customs house in nearby Bahía Blanca, the hotel could sleep 350 guests and rivaled the finest in the world. It had a solarium and a night club, a ballroom seating 150 where film...

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Club Hotel de la Ventana: The Short Golden Age

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The hotel opened to the public on 1 December 1911, and for a few years it played its part. In 1916 it hosted a glittering celebration for the centennial of Argentine independence, drawing the Crown Princess of Spain, the future King Edward VIII, and the President of Brazil. A dai...

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Club Hotel de la Ventana: Sailors of the Graf Spee

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For a strange interlude, the empty hotel filled with men in a foreign navy. In December 1939, the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, cornered after the Battle of the River Plate, was scuttled by her captain Hans Langsdorff in the harbor of Montevideo. More than a thousan...

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Club Hotel de la Ventana: What the Hills Keep

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When the sailors left, the hotel had no one. It had already been looted once in the 1920s, when a provincial plan to turn it into a holiday center for teachers and students came to nothing and the fine wines and furniture simply walked away. Now decay set in for good. Demolition ...

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