Videos to (Re)discover La Rambla XV. Cuatro Naciones Hotel

With this series of videos, we want to invite you to (Re)Discover La Rambla. We want to bring you closer to institutions, historic businesses, attractions, traditions...

This fourteenth video is dedicated to the Hotel Cuatro Naciones

The now modest Hotel Cuatro Naciones in Barcelona was once one of the city's most luxurious and has hosted illustrious guests, from Stendhal to Pirandello, including Buffalo Bill and Einstein.

Many tourists come to Barcelona looking for affordable accommodation on La Rambla. The Hotel Cuatro Naciones, located at number 40, is one of these budget hotels with suites with balconies and views of Barcelona's famous avenue. However, very few guests know that they are staying at the most legendary and elegant hotel in the city's history. Among those who stayed there were important figures such as Stendhal, Sand and Chopin, Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th president of the United States, Buffalo Bill, Albert Einstein, and the playwright Pirandello.

«All the important hotels in Barcelona in the eighteenth century belonged to Italian families from the province of Vercelli, in northern Italy», says Silvio Santagati, who researches Italian immigrants in Barcelona. The original founders of the Cuatro Naciones were apparently the Gippinis in 1706, originally from Ribera d'Orta, and the first to introduce coffee shops to Spain. At the time these Italians settled in Barcelona, La Rambla was simply a path alongside a stream, flanked by convents on one side and on the other by the city's old walls.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, the Cuatro Naciones was a preferred starting point for coaches traveling to Madrid, Zaragoza, or Valencia. Later, in the twentieth century, it became a refuge for the many fleeing the horrors following the French Revolution. The first recorded guest dates back to 1837 and was the French writer Stendhal. In his Memoirs of a Tourist, he confesses: "At the Rambla coach stop, a beautiful spot in the center of Barcelona. This was where the Hotel Cuatro Naciones was, and where we finally had dinner: a most pleasant moment." A year later, George Sand and Frederic Chopin arrived in Barcelona and also became guests of the Cuatro Naciones. The pair had just come from their unfortunate stay in Mallorca, where Chopin's health had gradually worsened, leading to his death from tuberculosis ten years later. Apparently, the hotel manager included on the bill the cost of burning his bed.

However, the hotel also lived through a golden age which, according to the newspaper La Publicitat in 1927, was the second half of the century, when Romantic celebrities filled the Principal Theatre (opposite the hotel). This period coincided with major innovations in Barcelona: the Catalan architect Molina i Casamajó built Plaça Reial (1848) on the site of the old Franciscan Capuchin convent and renovated the Cuatro Naciones, which was also a part of the convent. Another novelty was the gas lighting of the building, and you can still see the cast-iron dragon figures at the hotel entrance, which once served as gas lamps. It was one of the first businesses in Barcelona to use this system, says Javier Saiz, current owner of the hotel.

In December 1889, after a great success at the Universal Exposition in Paris, Buffalo Bill's Wild West show arrived in Barcelona. William Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, was on a European tour with a theatrical show that aimed to recreate the excitement of the Wild West. 184 people, 159 horses, and 20 buffalo arrived in Barcelona. While Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians stayed in tipis around a campfire, William Cody spent his days in Barcelona enjoying the comfort of the Cuatro Naciones. "William Cody always chooses luxurious suites where he can host visits from the press and his numerous fans," writes author Marill Escudo in her book That Winter: Buffalo Bill's Show in Barcelona. During the winter it rained cats and dogs and the whole city was brought to a halt by a flu outbreak. Some members of Buffalo Bill's company died.

On February 23, 1923, six months before the coup d'état of Primo de Rivera, the scientist Albert Einstein arrived in Barcelona with his wife and stayed at the Cuatro Naciones, rejecting the city council's offer to book them a room at the Hotel Ritz. "I am a modest citizen and have taken the room appropriate to my position," said Einstein.

Only two years later, on November 27, 1927, the hotel had to close, and the newspaper La Publicitat announced on its front page that a whole chapter of Barcelona's history had come to an end. However, in spite of this, the Cuatro Naciones reopened under the ownership of the Catalan Saiz family in 1967 and, even though the Eixample district now houses the most prestigious hotels, the world-famous avenue of Ciutat Vella, La Rambla, still proudly boasts its Hotel Cuatro Naciones and its list of illustrious ghosts who have watched silently over the past 300 years.

The "Videos to (Re)Discover La Rambla" are part of the project "La Rambla, a new model of Urban Tourism," with which Amics de La Rambla wants to invite you to ramble, to get to know La Rambla better, and to love it. The project is supported by the Generalitat de Catalunya, the Barcelona City Council, and GetYourGuide.