Four Seasons Hotel Ritz Lisbon

Rua Rodrigo da Fonseca climbs the hill beside Parque Eduardo VII, and at number 88 a long modernist block of pale stone looks down the park towards the Tagus. This is the Four Seasons Hotel Ritz Lisbon, a hotel that the Portuguese state willed into being at the end of the 1950s because the capital had nowhere grand enough to lodge visiting heads of state.

History

The idea dates from the early 1950s, when the government decided that Lisbon needed a hotel of international rank and brought in the Ritz name under licence. The building opened in 1959 and was run for its first four decades under the InterContinental banner. Four Seasons took over the management in 1998 and has kept the Ritz in the name, which is why the hotel carries two brands at once.

The brief given to the builders was unusual: the hotel was to be a display of Portuguese art and craft as much as a place to sleep. The commissions went to the leading painters, sculptors and weavers of the day, and most of that work is still in place. The hotel has been renovated several times since, most thoroughly in the years after Four Seasons arrived, but the mid-century bones were left alone.

Architecture and design

Porfírio Pardal Monteiro, the architect of Lisbon's Instituto Superior Técnico and of the Igreja de Nossa Senhora de Fátima, drew the plans. The result is a horizontal slab of a building with deep balconies on every floor, far removed from the Beaux-Arts palaces the Ritz name usually suggests. Inside, the public rooms were laid out around a lobby lined in marble and hung with large tapestries by José de Almada Negreiros, the painter who had drawn the murals of the Gare Marítima de Alcântara a decade earlier.

The interiors were planned with the Parisian decorator Henri Samuel, and the furniture of the period, much of it Louis XVI in spirit, sits against the modern shell without apology. The art collection runs to several hundred pieces, with sculpture in the corridors and paintings in the suites, and the hotel offers guided tours of it.

Rooms and suites

There are 282 rooms and suites. Almost all have a private terrace or balcony, a rarity in the city, and the rooms on the upper floors facing the park have the view that the architect planned: the length of Parque Eduardo VII, then the Baixa and the river beyond. The largest suites occupy the corners and keep period furniture and marble bathrooms.

Dining

Varanda, the main restaurant, opens on to a terrace above the park and serves a Portuguese and French menu; its weekend brunch is a Lisbon institution. CURA, the fine-dining room that opened in 2019, works with Portuguese produce in a short tasting format. The Ritz Bar keeps a long cocktail list and a terrace of its own, and the Almada Negreiros lounge serves tea beneath the tapestries.

Wellness

The spa occupies two floors with an indoor pool, treatment rooms and a fitness centre. The feature that guests remember is on the roof: a 400-metre outdoor running track with the whole city as a backdrop, part of a rooftop fitness floor added during the Four Seasons renovation.

Weddings and events

The hotel holds a licence for weddings and has several function rooms, including a ballroom with its own foyer and a set of smaller salons on the lobby floor. It is the usual choice of embassies and large companies for formal dinners in Lisbon. Capacities and room names are not stated here because they vary with the layout chosen.

Location

The hotel sits at the top of Parque Eduardo VII, above Marquês de Pombal and the Avenida da Liberdade, which puts the luxury shops of the avenue and the Baixa within walking distance downhill. Marquês de Pombal metro station is a few minutes away on foot. Humberto Delgado Airport is about 20 minutes by car. Among the luxury hotels in Lisbon it is the one with the most space, the most art and the widest view.