The first time, I came for the beach. I was tracing a palm-fringed world of cold beers and hot swimsuits, beach volleyball, tan lines, and pristine sands, 3,000 miles around the Brazilian coast. Copacabana was where I began. For glorious Brazilian beaches, Copacabana is ground zero. But the last time—and there were many visits in between—I came just for the hotel, the elegant Copacabana Palace. It was the hotel that created this place; that made this strip of sand famous and helped to conjure the idea of the beach as central to Brazilian identity. When the Copacabana Palace opened a hundred years ago, it occupied an unheralded neighborhood, amid modest houses and fishermen’s shacks. Until then, Rio de Janeiro had been centered on the old downtown areas of Centro and Castelo, and the 19th-century mansions of leafy Santa Teresa. But a new age of leisure arrived in the post-war years. Sunbathing was suddenly a thing, and Coco Chanel made having a tan fashionable. Designed by French architect Joseph Gire, the Copacabana Palace adopted the elegant art deco lines of the grand hotels of the French Riviera. A Parisian dancer, Mistinguett, reputed to have the most beautiful legs in the world, arrived for the hotel’s inauguration, and suddenly everyone’s gaze turned south to Copacabana, to the new hotel and to the glorious beach that was its doorstep. A century on, the Copacabana Palace is still a Rio icon, bestriding the Avenida Atlântica on that incomparable bay. The style is classic opulence: vast chandeliers, acres of marble and Brazilian hardwoods; a sanctuary among the city’s endless partying. But this is Brazil. The Palace may be grand, but it is also fun. It pulls you into a cheeky Brazilian embrace: comforting, perhaps, but always a little flirtatious. At breakfast overlooking the famous pool, beautiful and lively Brazilians are all around. Ken Hom is the storied chef behind Michelin-starred Pan-Asian restaurant Mee, though my favorite is the Cipriani, an elegant Italian that would impress in a top Roman hotel. There is a rooftop tennis court, and, across the avenue on that famous beach, hotel staff attend guests with umbrellas and loungers, cold towels, and sun lotion. Around the hotel’s centenary, it is still impossible to think of Rio, or that famous beach swooning round the bay, without the Copacabana Palace. From $441. —Stanley Stewart
