Dr. Rafael de Miero brought the blueprints back from Paris himself. A Buenos Aires businessman with a taste for the French Second Empire, de Miero spent months consulting engineers in France before construction began on what he intended as the finest hotel in Latin America. It took about a decade and cost a fortune, with marble columns and etched glass windows shipped in from Europe.
When the Alvear Palace opened in 1932 on Avenida Alvear, in the Recoleta neighborhood porteños still call the Paris of South America, a local paper called it the biggest, most sumptuous, and most modern hotel in the city. Tourism to Buenos Aires slowed through the Dirty War of the 1970s and 80s, and the hotel fell into disrepair before the Sutton Group bought and restored it in the 1990s. It’s now one of four Argentine properties on the Leading Hotels of the World list.