Copacabana Palace, A Belmond Hotel

Rio built the Copacabana Palace before it quite knew what it wanted to be, and then spent a century becoming the city the hotel had imagined. It went up in 1923, a great wedding cake of a building facing a beach that was still half wilderness, and within a decade it had gathered every visiting film star, deposed monarch and dance band in the hemisphere.

What is remarkable is how little of that has curdled into nostalgia. The Copa still functions as a working luxury hotel rather than a museum of one. Belmond has restored it carefully, resisting the temptation to modernise away the things that make it itself, and the result is a building that feels its age in the best possible way.

The Pool

You come for the pool, and you should. It is not the largest in Rio or the newest, but it is unquestionably the most consequential piece of water in Brazil. Politicians have been made and unmade around it. It has appeared in more films than most actors.

In practice it is simply a very good pool, generously proportioned, lined with proper loungers, and staffed by people who understand the difference between attentive and intrusive. Order a caipirinha and watch an entire social order arrange itself around the deep end.

Rooms and the Question of Which Side

The rooms are large and comfortably traditional, with parquet, high ceilings and the sort of proportions that stopped being built decades ago. The decision that matters is the view. Ocean-facing rooms look straight out over Copacabana beach, which is spectacular and, on carnival weekends, extremely loud.

Pool-side rooms are quieter and arguably more atmospheric, since you look down into the courtyard rather than out at the traffic on the Avenida. If you are here to sleep rather than to be photographed, take the pool.

Eating

Cipriani is the grand Italian restaurant and it is genuinely good, which is not always true of grand hotel restaurants with famous names. The Michelin attention it has attracted is deserved.

But the more useful meal is breakfast on the terrace, taken slowly, with the beach filling up in front of you and the mountains behind still holding cloud. It is the best introduction to Rio the city offers.

The Verdict

A genuine grande dame that has managed the difficult trick of aging without becoming a period piece. If you are going to Rio once, stay here, take a room over the pool, and give yourself one entirely unstructured afternoon.