The hotel was never meant to stand alone. It was the centerpiece of an entire neighborhood willed into being by the developer Alfredo Arocena and his Balneario Carrasco company, who dreamed of a refined seaside resort where there had been little but coastline. To design it, they brought in Carlos Thays, the celebrated French-Argentine landscape architect trained under Edouard Andre, the same designer behind grand parks across the Americas. Thays laid out Carrasco as a green garden suburb of curving avenues and shaded squares, and the hotel rose at its heart as the reason to come. Its style was eclectic and historicist, neoclassical and baroque at once, modeled on the great palace hotels of Europe.

Almost from the start, the Carrasco became Montevideo's address for the famous. In 1925, Albert Einstein lodged here during his South American tour, fresh from the revolution he had worked on the nature of space and time. In 1934, the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca stayed within its walls, a few short years before his murder at the start of the Spanish Civil War. The guest list reflected the hotel's role as a meeting point of two worlds - a place where European intellectual life touched down on the River Plate. Down in the basement, the casino kept the rooms above lively, and the building became shorthand for glamour itself.

Glamour does not always last. The hotel was declared a National Historical Heritage site in 1975, but recognition could not save it from decline. In 1997 the Carrasco closed its doors, and for sixteen years the belle-epoque landmark sat dark and empty on the Rambla, its grandeur fading behind shuttered windows. Locals passed the silent palace and remembered what it had been. It is a familiar arc for great old buildings - splendor, abandonment, and the long uncertainty of whether anyone will care enough to bring them back.

The building that survived all this drama was the work of the architects Gaston Mallet and the Swiss Jacques Dunant, who gave Carrasco the silhouette of a European grand hotel transplanted to the South Atlantic shore. Its eclectic-historicist design mixes neoclassical restraint with baroque flourish, all of it oriented toward the sea so that guests could take in the Rio de la Plata from its terraces. The hotel was conceived as the anchor of a place meant for leisure - the casino in the basement, the ballrooms above, the beach and gardens just beyond the door. More than a building, it was a promise about what the new century on this coast might feel like: gracious, modern, and unmistakably grand.

Someone did. Beginning in 2009, a careful restoration brought the building back over four years, and on 7 March 2013 the Carrasco reopened - now the Sofitel Montevideo Casino Carrasco and Spa, with 116 rooms and suites, a restored casino, and a restaurant named 1921 for the year it first welcomed guests. The revival rippled outward, just as Thays had once intended for the whole neighborhood: the surrounding streets filled with new life, and Rostand Street and its plaza became one of the city's favorite places to stroll. Nearly a century after it first opened, the seaside palace was once again the heart of Carrasco.