If age is just a number, how old is old? It all depends on your point of view. Australian hotels labelled “historic” might not have stood for a hundred years. Hotel Kurrajong in Canberra, for instance, steeped as it is in political history, opened its doors in 1926 as government housing and is now a venerated relic of our capital’s past.
Today, InterContinental Marseille – Hotel Dieu, a world-class luxury hotel, inhabits the same prized spot in the hilly Panier district of the city’s old quarter. The history of the magnificent building in which it’s housed is interwoven with that of the city itself. The remains of a 12th-century chapel are buried beneath the hotel’s gardens.Pausing for a moment at the foot of a steep driveway that leads to the hotel’s reception, I spare a thought for the people who have made the climb before me.
I climb back up the hill for sunset drinks on the hotel’s open-air terrace, serenaded by an acoustic guitarist who sounds just like Sting. Over dinner of and plump, roasted scallops, I ask the waitress for her perspective on working in a hotel with 800 years of recorded history.“Eight hundred? Ah no, it’s more like two thousand,” she says. “The Romans were here a long time ago.”
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