Hotel das Cataratas, A Belmond Hotel

The Hotel

Hotel das Cataratas opened in 1958 inside Iguaçu National Park, the 185,000-hectare UNESCO World Heritage protected forest on the Brazilian side of the Iguaçu River, at a moment when Brazil was building a tourist infrastructure for one of the most spectacular natural sites in the western hemisphere. The salmon-pink Portuguese-colonial main building, two storeys around a central courtyard, was designed in the Manueline-revival style fashionable in mid-century Brazilian state architecture and is a listed cultural heritage building under Brazil's IPHAN. The property passed through state-tourism management and the Tropical Hotels group before Belmond (then Orient-Express Hotels) took the management contract in 2007 and ran a full restoration completed in 2012. Belmond Group is now owned by LVMH, which acquired the company in 2019.

The 187 rooms and suites are distributed across two storeys around the central garden courtyard. Categories begin at the colonial Superior rooms (about 32 square metres) and ascend through Deluxe, Deluxe Premium, the Junior Suites, the Family Suites with two interconnecting rooms, and the named heritage suites. The four named suites, the Estate Suite, the Heritage Suite and two Pool Suites with their own plunge pools, are the headline inventory; the Estate Suite is the largest at over 100 square metres. Materials are colonial-Brazilian: dark hardwood floors, hand-loomed cotton, terracotta tiles in the bathrooms, wrought-iron balconies onto the courtyard. The 2012 restoration replaced every bathroom, upgraded the climate control, and refreshed the interiors under designer Michael Stanton without disturbing the building's listed envelope.

The hotel's central proposition is location. The Belmond is the only hotel within the Brazilian Iguaçu National Park. The pedestrian trail to the lower falls overlook starts roughly 200 metres from the lobby; the famous Cataratas walkway with its views of the Devil's Throat is a 15-minute walk away. After the park gates close at 5 PM (or earlier in winter), guests have private after-hours access to the trails and the lower lookouts, a quiet sunrise hike to the Naipi Falls overlook before the buses arrive at 9 AM is the single most-frequently-cited reason to book the property. Dining sits at the Belmond standard: Itaipu Restaurant for à la carte Brazilian-French; Ipê Grill by the pool for daytime; Tarobá for caipirinhas; afternoon tea on the colonial veranda; and a long-table Brazilian Sunday brunch that the local Foz do Iguaçu families also book. The pool is a 25-metre rectangle in the central courtyard surrounded by the colonial arcades.

Service is run to the Belmond brand standard with the regional Brazilian warmth that lifts it above the global average for the chain. Spa Cataratas, with treatment rooms drawing on Amazonian botanical traditions (cupuaçu, açaí, andiroba), is a quiet supplementary attraction; the in-house Belmond Guides organise everything from the helicopter overflight to the Macuco Safari Zodiac at the base of the falls. For travellers who came to South America for Iguaçu specifically, rather than as a layover between Buenos Aires and Rio, there is no other credible address.

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