Portuguese hotels make Condé Nast list

Condé Nast Traveller has revealed its Gold List for European hotels in 2021 and among the list are two Portuguese units.

They are The Albatroz in Cascais and the Santa Clara 1728 in Lisbon.
The five-star The Albatroz is located on the Bay of Cascais and underwent extensive refurbishment of both rooms and public areas in 2019.
The renovation project was done by the company Graça Viterbo and covered the main hotel lounges and reception areas, including the restaurant and bar.
Now a comfortable modern boutique hotel on the Estoril Coast, the project restored the original beauty of the three buildings that comprise the hotel.
The hotel dates from the 1960s when it was called the ‘Estalagem Albatroz’ (Albatroz Inn) but the XIX century building has been renovated various times. It was commissioned by the Duke of Loulé and designed by architect Luís Pedro d’Ávila in 1873.
The Hotel Albatroz (former Palace of the Dukes de Loulé was one of the first town mansions built by the nobility in Cascais as a summer residence when the royal family were in town in the summer.
The hotel currently has 45 rooms and six suites, 8 events rooms with a 100 person capacity, and a restaurant.
The Santa Clara 1728, built in that year as the name suggests, is in Lisbon and overlooks the National Pantheon.
The refurbishment project was undertaken by architects Manuel Aires Mateus on a former XVIII century mansion that has six suites.
The two projects were among a handful of bright lights in an otherwise dark year for the Portuguese hotel and tourism industry as statistics revealed this week that almost half of all hotels were closed in November as tourism dried up because of the pandemic.
For the month, hotels only had 415,000 guests, responsible for 950,000 bed occupancies which based on the previous year means a fall of 70% on 2019.