Where there were once excitable guests filling rooms, restaurants and pools, porters shipping suitcases across shining floors and phones ringing off the hook at reception desks, there's now just dust, decay and silence. From crumbling beach resorts frequented by yesterday's elite to former grande dames of hospitality flanked by forests and lakes, these are the stories and swansongs of Europe's most interesting and atmospheric abandoned hotels.
Not even one of the most feared and respected chefs on the planet could bring La Gondola back from the brink of disaster. Having appeared on Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares television show in 2005 in a desperate bid to reverse decades of decline, the Derbyshire hotel and restaurant finally entered voluntary administration in 2008. It was a popular local venue during the 1970s and 1980s, but business was at a low ebb by the turn of the millennium.
A short-lived attempt to resurrect La Gondola as a wedding venue failed in 2009, while former owner Daniela Bayfield also planned to reopen the hotel as a shelter for refugees. This unfortunately didn’t get off the ground either, and fires and dereliction mean the site is now considered very dangerous. After years of abandonment and vandalism, La Gondola may not stay standing much longer – there are plans to demolish the building and redevelop the plot into flats. While La Gondola has escaped the bulldozers before, it’s unlikely to do so forever.
With its paradise-island location and futuristic design, the Haludovo Palace Hotel should have been a slam-dunk for Croatian tourism. And for a time it was, with celebrities and sportspeople flocking here for summer holidays in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1972, a year after opening, Haludovo Palace was expanded to include a casino by Bob Guccione, founder of US adult magazine Penthouse, who invested a cool $45 million (£202m/$250m today) into its development.
Yugoslavia was a communist country and did not permit its citizens to gamble, but the venue still attracted wealthy international clientele. However, Guccione’s outgoings were so excessive that the casino went bankrupt in 1973. Despite this, Haludovo Palace retained its reputation among high-end travellers until the 1990s, when war tore through the region. The once-buzzing Adriatic resort – having lost all its foreign custom – has stood abandoned ever since, one of several such ghost hotels on the Balkan peninsula.
This former villa in Germany’s Black Forest opened as a grand hotel in 1902. It would probably be called a boutique hotel by today’s standards, offering 140 luxurious rooms to domestic and international holidaymakers, as well as royals, actors and writers. Schlosshotel Waldlust went through several owners during its heyday, one of whom was apparently a woman named ‘Adele B’ or ‘Adi’, who it is said ran the business brilliantly until she was murdered in one of the rooms in 1949.
After the Second World War, the Waldlust endured a steady decline as a working hotel. The building was ultimately converted into a military hospital and closed for good in 2005, with occasional stints in German horror movies and music videos in the years since. Nowadays, it is a protected cultural monument managed by a local association that operates guided tours, photo tours and concerts at the venue.
Though designed to resemble the shape of a ship, Hotel Belvedere du Rayon Vert is actually much closer to the railway than it is to the sea. It opened in 1932 as Cerbere’s train station hotel and some claim that it was the first reinforced concrete construction in the world. In its heyday during the early 1930s, the Art Deco hotel welcomed well-travelled guests with an array of high-end amenities. It had a ballroom, a theatre and even a tennis court on the roof.
By 1936 civil war had erupted in neighbouring Spain, and the Belvedere’s proximity to the border meant it saw heavily reduced footfall during this time. The Wehrmacht then resided here between 1942 and 1944, with the hotel struggling through the following decades before closing down in 1983. It is now a designated historic monument, with part of the property repurposed as rental apartments. Those staying also get a guided tour of the areas otherwise closed to the public.
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In its prime, the seaside enclave of Varosha on the sun-soaked island of Cyprus was a luxurious bolthole that counted Hollywood A-listers like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton among its clientele. Lavish hotels such as the Argo, the Grecian and the King George became havens of hedonism, attracting tourists from all around the world looking for the next trendy alternative to the French Riviera.
But when conflict with Turkey divided the island in 1974, Varosha was abandoned by its Greek-Cypriot residents who were forced to flee to safety. The hotels closed their doors indefinitely and ultimately fell into disrepair, along with the rest of the town. In 2020, Varosha – having been sealed off for almost 50 years – controversially trialled day visits, and some resorts have since partially reopened for tours.
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Also styled Ostan Gweedore, the eerie shell of this abandoned hotel looks out over an equally foreboding shipwreck, the Bad Eddie, on Donegal's Magheraclogher Bay. Legendary footballer George Best was known to holiday at the 32-room property in the 1970s and 1980s, as he played with the owner's cousin in the Manchester United squad. Then, you would have been able to take a dip in the hotel's heated pool, enjoy an aperitif in the bar and visit the on-site beauty salon.
But since 2015, Ostan Ghaoth Dobhair has been left to rot after being auctioned off and forgotten. As recently as May 2023, urban explorers were reported to have accessed the hotel and documented its ruin on TikTok, where their videos show that the building has become saturated with mould, moss and weeds. But that all looks set to change, as planning permission was granted in 2022 for a multimillion-euro refurbishment of the Ostan and the nearby Seaview Hotel.
Hotel Polissya had been open for 10 years when nuclear reactor Unit 4 exploded at the nearby Chernobyl power plant in 1986, killing, injuring and displacing many thousands of people. Now, the eight-storey abandoned hotel is one of the tallest buildings left standing in the exclusion zone. Before the disaster, the venue would host delegates and guests visiting Pripyat and Chernobyl, and there were even plans to open a café with a summer terrace on the rooftop. Sadly, this dream never had the chance to be realised.
In the following decades Pripyat became a hotspot for disaster tourism, and people came from all over the world to see the ghost town for themselves. Along with Hotel Polissya, there are deserted amusement parks, schools, stadiums and the Palace of Culture (a recreation centre). Though it's been a long time since anyone stayed at Hotel Polissya, it has lived on in other ways, and has been featured in video games like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl.
This former grand hotel began life in 1899 and became one of the most popular haunts of the Barcelona bourgeoisie when it expanded to include a casino and theme park in 1911. There was also a restaurant with Parisian chefs at the helm, an in-house orchestra and beautiful gardens filled with plants from all across the globe. For a short time, the hotel and casino exemplified glamour and grandeur, until new legislation slammed the brakes on its prosperity.
Gambling was banned in 1912, and so Casino de la Rabassada slid into decline. It was shuttered during the 1930s, and was used for bomb shelters and barracks during the Spanish Civil War before being abandoned. Today, the complex stands in ruins in Parc de Collserola, just outside Barcelona on the slopes of Mount Tibidabo. The site is privately owned, but glimpses of the ruins can still be seen from the road.
Clinging to a cliffside on the outskirts of Dubrovnik, Hotel Belvedere was once a renowned luxury resort. Back in 1985 when it first opened, the property had over 200 rooms, a helipad and even its own private dock for well-heeled guests arriving by sea. It served sophisticated sun-seekers for six years, until the Croatian War of Independence led to its abandonment in 1991 and subsequent destruction. After Dubrovnik was besieged at the beginning of the conflict, the Belvedere’s only occupants were a community of Croatian refugees.
For years Hotel Belvedere stood empty and largely forgotten, save for a few resident cats and visiting urban explorers. When filming for the Game of Thrones television series came to Croatia, the hotel’s intact amphitheatre became the site for the now-infamous trial-by-combat scene between Oberyn Martell (played by Pedro Pascal) and The Mountain (Hafthor Julius Bjornsson). There are now imminent plans to revamp Hotel Belvedere, involving the demolition of its abandoned shell and the construction of a supposedly seven-star hotel complex in its place.
A holiday camp with an important difference, Prora was intended to be a sprawling resort on the Baltic Sea for those deemed to be part of the so-called 'national German community'. Built between 1936 and 1939 on the orders of Adolf Hitler by the Nazi leisure organisation Kraft durch Freude ('Strength through joy'), the eight buildings that came to be known as the Colossus of Prora were scheduled to contain a 20,000-capacity festival hall, arenas, pools, theatres, cinemas and more.
The construction was never completed, and Prora was never used for the purpose for which it was designed. During the Second World War, it became a training camp for the Nazi military police, and later for the East and United German armies. Though the complex has since been partially repurposed as a residential development, holiday resort and youth hostel, it stood abandoned for several decades. Today, you can take a tour of the grounds around Block 5 to learn more about Prora’s history.
Another victim of the conflicts that tore through the European continent during the 20th century, the old spa town of Gagra lies in the self-declared autonomous republic of Abkhazia, to the northwest of Georgia. During the 1920s, a health resort was established here overlooking the Black Sea and went on to make a name for itself as a popular retreat on what was dubbed the Soviet Riviera.
In its prime the resort boasted a number of high-end hotels and holiday homes, shopping centres, its own train station and a theatre. But, as tensions mounted in the region, Gagra was abandoned in the late 1980s. It later suffered severe bomb damage during the Abkhazian-Georgian war in 1992, where it was the site of probably the conflict’s largest and bloodiest battle. While restoration of the area is gradually being attempted, there are still many empty hotels and derelict sanatoriums.
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Purpose-built for Sarajevo’s Winter Olympics in 1984, the brutalist behemoth that is Hotel Igman had the honour of hosting some of the world’s most formidable athletes during the competition in its 162 rooms. But fast-forward less than a decade and the former jewel of the Olympic village had a wildly different function, being used as the headquarters for Ratko Mladic’s Bosnian Serb army (and later a detention facility) after the siege of Sarajevo began in 1992.
When former Yugoslavia finally emerged from the grip of bloody war, what was left of Hotel Igman and the rest of the Olympic village remained abandoned for some time. In 2022, 30 years after Sarajevo was besieged, Hotel Igman was sold on for the 13th time. It is set to be the subject of a huge renovation effort, which will hopefully result in a new cultural landmark for the city.
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On the Dalmatian coast, five miles (8km) south of Dubrovnik, lie the crumbling remains of a former state-of-the-art tourist complex built for Yugoslavia’s military elite and their families. In the 1960s, there were six hotels here – the Grand, Kupari, Goricina, Goricine II, Galeb and Pelegrin – which had enough rooms combined for 1,600 guests simultaneously. While regular holidaymakers were allowed to book into Kupari, the resort was so exclusive that availability was hard to come by unless you knew the right people.
In the early 1990s, during the Croatian War of Independence, the once-opulent beach resort was completely decimated. After looting each of the hotels, Yugoslav forces set fire to them floor by floor. While many of the resort's buildings have been bulldozed in the time since, the Grand Hotel (built in 1919) was saved from the same fate as a protected historical monument. Plans for its renovation are now in the pipeline, as well as proposals to build two new hotels where now-felled ones once stood.
The Grande Albergo Hotel has had a long and fascinating history. Opened in Locarno – a Swiss, Italian-speaking resort city on the northern shore of Lake Maggiore – in 1876, this once-resplendent venue was where negotiations of the Locarno Treaties were held in 1925. These talks resulted in an agreement which was meant to guarantee peace in Western Europe after the First World War. Following the Second World War, the Grande Albergo took centre-stage again – this time as the site of a new film festival slated to rival the one in Venice.
The building remained the beating heart of the Locarno Film Festival until the 1970s, with its garden seating 1,200 viewers at a time. But screenings were then moved to the city’s Piazza Grande and, by 2005, the hotel had closed down. There have been numerous attempts to resurrect it in recent years – and now things are finally looking up for the Grande Albergo. Investors have pledged to turn it into a 5-star spa hotel with three restaurants, with reopening planned for 2025.
It’s hard to imagine how anyone could abandon a building as beautiful as Castello di Sammezzano, with its eclectic architecture and Arabesque design details. But no one has slept in any of its 365 rooms since 1990. The castle, completed in its original state in 1605, has fulfilled many functions in the course of its long life and seen even more owners – including the notorious Medici family. It was Marquis Ferdinando Panciatichi Ximenes d'Aragona, a Florentine polymath, who transformed di Sammezzano into the 19th-century masterpiece it is now.
After being raided by the Nazis during the Second World War and later repurposed as a military hospital by the Allies, di Sammezzano was reopened as a luxury hotel and restaurant in the early 1970s. By 1990, the business had failed and the premises were vacated, leaving the castle to fall into a spiral of abandonment, failed recoveries and worsening decay. It’s unclear whether or not the building will ever welcome guests again.
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