Hotel du Portugal

This hotel is part of the heritage of Vernet les Bains. The town is a thermal spa where people still come for treatments for rheumatoid and other conditions. The heyday for visits to Vernet was during the Belle Epoque in the early years of the twentieth century. Many rich English people including Rudyard Kipling and Princess Beatrice visited the several luxury hotels. This has all disappeared. Fashions change and the town is now better known as a rural retreat and a walking centre. The nail in the coffin was the great flood of 1947 which swept away the hotels, of which only the Hotel du Portugal survives, now used as a holiday centre for workers from the Ministry of Defense.