Hotel Ritz (Lisbon)
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| Four Seasons Hotel Ritz Lisbon | |
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 Interactive map of the Four Seasons Hotel Ritz Lisbon area | |
| General information | |
| Location | Rua Rodrigo da Fonseca 88, 1099-039, Lisbon, Portugal |
| Coordinates | 38°43′32″N 09°09′19″W / 38.72556°N 9.15528°W |
| Opening | 1959 |
| Management | Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts |
| Technical details | |
| Floor count | 15 |
| Design and construction | |
| Architect | Porfírio Pardal Monteiro |
| Developer | SODIM (Sociedade de Investimentos Imobiliários) |
| Other information | |
| Number of rooms | 290 |
| Number of suites | 20 |
| Website | |
| www | |
The Four Seasons Hotel Ritz Lisbon is a luxury hotel located in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon. It was built in the 1950s on the wishes of the leader of the Portuguese Estado Novo dictatorship, António de Oliveira Salazar, who considered that the capital had no hotel of sufficient quality for important foreign visitors.
Since 1912, there had been the idea in Lisbon that the construction of a large luxury hotel was a pressing need. In the 1930s, a leading hotelier did purchase land for this purpose but eventually ended up selling it. The idea resurfaced when planning was underway for the Portuguese World Exhibition (Portuguese: Exposição do Mundo Português), which was held in Lisbon in 1940 to mark 800 years since the foundation of the country and 300 years since the restoration of independence from Spain. It was considered that there would be many important visitors without anywhere suitable for them to stay. The plan was to call the new hotel A Casa do Império (The House of the Empire). However, although several hotel projects were considered all were abandoned.[1][2]
Design
In 1950, Salazar returned to the idea of building "a great first-class hotel in Lisbon" and took personal responsibility to supervise the project. A financing company, SODIM (Sociedade de Investimentos Imobiliários), was created especially for this purpose, with 11 partners including the businessman, Manuel Queiroz Pereira, and the banker Ricardo Espírito Santo, who was very close to Salazar and was his initial contact to develop the idea. In 1952, the architect, Porfírio Pardal Monteiro, a renowned Portuguese modernist architect, was contacted by Pereira to help select the location for the future hotel. In 1952, even before the acquisition of the land, Monteiro had started to make a preliminary sketch. A second study carried out in the same year produced a design without the rooms having balconies and was said to have displayed the influence of the work of Le Corbusier. A third version, completed in 1954, was sent to the Ritz hotel chain in Paris, whose architect considered it insufficiently modern. By the beginning of 1955 a new design had been completed by Monteiro in partnership with Jorge Ferreira Chaves and several young architects including Monteiro's son, António. Unlike earlier designs, which had employed two perpendicular blocks, this consisted of just one block. This early 1955 design was very similar to the final one, with all rooms having balconies, as the views of Lisbon's Edward VII Park and the rest of the city were considered to be one of the selling points of the new hotel.[1][2][3][4][5]
