Independence or death. That was the motto of the Brazilian empire, a state that emerged after independence from Portugal in 1822. The imperial adventure lasted 67 years and had two kings: Pedro I and his son Pedro II, deposed in 1889 by Deodoro da Fonseca, the first president of the Republic. from Brazil. The current one, Lula da Silva, is the thirty-ninth.
The eleventh, Epitácio Pessoa, wanted the centenary of independence to be celebrated in style with a great international exhibition in 1922 in the capital: Rio de Janeiro. That year coincided with the revolution at the Copacabana fort, an attempted coup born in response to some letters, later recognized as false, published in Correio da Manhã criticizing the military establishment. Fake news from a century ago.
Three kilometers from the fort and following the beach to the northeast, that same 1922 a luxurious hotel facing the ocean was built to accommodate the many visitors to the exhibition. Its construction was a personal request from President Pessoa to businessman Octávio Guinle. In exchange for generous tax breaks, Guinle promised to have everything ready for the celebrations, although the Copacabana Palace finally opened its doors on August 13, 1923, twenty days after the closing of an exhibition that is a distant memory, not the Cup, an establishment that is the pride and symbol of the city.
The hotel that commemorated the independence of a European country was made… European, since its architecture was directly inspired by the Carlton in Cannes and the Negresco in Nice. When it was inaugurated, its political promoter had already been replaced by the twelfth president, Artur Bernardes, who was one of the authorities invited to the grand opening party. His successor, Washington Luís, also went down in the history of the hotel, although for an unexpected reason. On May 23, 1928, he found himself in one of his suites with his mistress, an Italian Marchioness 30 years his junior. After a heated discussion, Elvira Vishi Maurich took out a pistol, shot him and seriously injured him. With the discretion typical of large hotels, and more so in the case of the president of the nation, the transfer to a hospital was secret and fast. Once there, it was officially reported that Luís had had an attack of appendicitis and he underwent emergency surgery. She did pass away. Four days later she committed suicide, also according to the official version.
Ten years after its inauguration, the Copa toured the world thanks to the film Flying to Rio de Janeiro, the first film in which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced together, and it took place in the hotel. The artistic team never left the RKO studios in Los Angeles, where the lounges and terraces were reproduced to perfection, in addition to filming some aerial scenes over the city with absolute prominence of the beach and the hotel, which also became famous for its casino, one of the first in the country and where great fortunes were gambled.
The sixteenth president, Marshal Dutra, once again influenced the Copa by banning gambling throughout the country, forcing the closure of the establishment’s gaming rooms, which were turned into a theater, a beautiful room that has been reopened a long time ago. a few months after decades of no use. Then came the transfer of the capital from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia in 1960. The great move was accompanied by a certain slowdown in the city, although its attractiveness and the dynamism of the cariocas made it a desired destination again after a few years. It was then that Orient Express, today Belmond, part of LVMH, bought the hotel.
“Except for the mandatory time due to the 2020 health crisis, this hotel has never closed and continues to be the symbol of the great Latin American hotel industry,” Ulisses Marreiros told La Vanguardia. Marreiros, a Portuguese by origin who has spent many years in Majorca, is one of those great hotel managers who knows absolutely everything that happens in his house. He is as expansive as he is discreet when the situation requires it and he is as kind to his most important client (it would be very long to make a minimal list of VIP guests) as he is to all of his staff, more than half a thousand employees. He is now working on the final preparations for the centenary party on the night of August 17. The event promises to be popular, whether the current president of the Federative Republic of Brazil is there… or not.
