Colombia
This former hotel is said to be haunted
The former beauty of the hotel can now only be guessed at.
© sduraku / Shutterstock.com
Huge window fronts, luxurious rooms with balconies and alleged deaths from ghosts made this hotel famous in Colombia.
If you want to marvel at the spectacular Tequendama waterfalls near the Colombian capital Bogotá, you will inevitably pass the “haunted hotel” del Salto, which despite its obvious decay still towers majestically over the abyss. In the 1990s, the property had to close its doors forever, supposedly because ghosts were up to mischief.
Splendor and splendor are a thing of the past
Pompous parties, champagne and glamor – it all took shape in the form of the Hotel del Salto. In 1923, the architect Carlos Arturo Tapias designed a unique building that hugs the mountainside and was considered one of the best hotels in the world when it opened. There are many legends and stories about the complex, which for all its past glory also has dark secrets. This led to a number of tragic deaths that conspiracy theorists attribute to ghost figures. But hotel guests are said to have died not only out of fear.
Inspired by an Indian legend, many hotel guests and unhappy lovers fell to their deaths at the waterfalls. In order to escape slavery by the Spanish conquistadors, the Chibcha Indians jumped into the water and turned into eagles when they fell so that they could fly safely to freedom. A fatal mistake.
Disgusting stench drove guests away
Another reason the hotel had inevitably closed was because of the disgusting smell. All sewage and fecal matter in the greater Bogotá area was and is still being discharged into the river. It is not for nothing that the Río Bogotá, which feeds the Tequendama Falls, is considered to be one of the worst contaminated rivers in the world.
Dead, bestial stench and ghosts – not good conditions for a flourishing inn. And so the horror hotel was slowly but surely left to decay. After mosses and ferns had spread in the once magnificent building and the formerly pink walls crumbled, the Colombian Institute of Natural Sciences took on the building and turned it into a museum.
Today tourists want to see the horror hotel and take a not entirely harmless journey to get there. Landslides and mudslides regularly roll over the road that leads up to the museum. It is not for nothing that there is the warning: “Be sure you are back in town before night falls.”