Built for the View

I went to the Azores alone, with this place near the top of the list. I’d seen it online so many times — the grand hotel on the crater rim, fog pouring over the lakes — that not going would have felt like a wasted flight. So I climbed up to it solo, twice, through some of the most surreal landscape I’ve ever stood in: a green volcanic bowl, lakes the colour of two different skies, weather that rewrites the whole view every few minutes.

The hotel earns the legend. You feel the ambition the moment you step into the atrium — a soaring central void with galleries stacked around it, balconies looking in and out, a space built to make arriving feel like an occasion. They poured a fortune into the view. Then, almost immediately, it closed; the story goes it was open barely long enough to learn its guests’ names. The grandest hotel on the island, abandoned while the paint was still new.

The first time up it was calm enough. The second time the mountain threw everything at me — wind that shoved you sideways, rain coming in flat through every empty window, and me soaked to the bone within minutes. And honestly? The vibe was unmatched. A storm howling through a five-storey concrete ghost, fog ripping across the crater, the whole place groaning and dripping around me. I’ve rarely felt anywhere more alive than that drenched, half-blown-over hour.

I got completely soaked and I’d do it again tomorrow. Some places are best met in bad weather — the storm was the whole point.

Inside, it’s gone fully feral. The atrium opens straight to the sky where the roof has failed; ferns grow out of the lobby; water sheets down a corridor and turns the floor into a long dark mirror. The famous staircase still spirals up through the middle of it, sculptural and graffiti-bombed, leading to floor after floor of identical empty rooms — each one still doing the single thing it was made for: framing the crater.

The best seat, vacant

A few times the cloud pulled back and the lakes appeared, blue and green in their ring of hills, exactly the postcard the whole building was a bet on. Then the fog closed again and the hotel went back to being a concrete ghost with the curtains permanently open.

That’s the cruelty and the beauty of an abandoned hotel anywhere: it keeps its promise perfectly and has no one left to keep it for. This one just happens to make that promise from one of the most extraordinary balconies on earth — and it let me have it, soaked and grinning, entirely to myself.