Photo credit: Janet Donovan
Welcome to Hotel Britania. Humphrey Bogart slept here. …..so did we. Located on a quiet street just off Lisbon’s Avenida da Liberdade in the historic center of Lisbon, the small Boutique hotel boasts a pure Art Deco design, dates back to the 1940’s and was designed by the famous Portuguese modernist architect Cassiano Branco. Hotel Britania is the only hotel of that period to have survived intact and is classified as a historic building. Around the corner is luxury shopping, flea markets, coffee shops with lots of cafe lattes and a decidedly Parisian feel.
Portugal remained neutral during World War II and Lisbon had a pivotal role in that history. “It was the only European city in which both the Allies and the Axis power operated openly and was the temporary home to much of Europe’s exiled royalty, refugees seeking passage to the U.S., and a host of spies, secret police, captains of industry, bankers, prominent Jews, writers and artists, escaped POWs, and black marketeers. An operations officer writing in 1944 described the daily scene at Lisbon’s airport as being like the movie Casablanca, times twenty.” Neill Lochery, author of Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Lights.
Casablanca, of course, was the Academy Award winning flick starring Bogart as nightclub owner Rick Blaine. One of his conversations went like this:
Renault: The plane to Lisbon. You would like to be on it?
Rick: Why, what’s in Lisbon?
Renault: The clipper to America. I’ve often speculated on why you don’t return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Did you run off with a senator’s wife? I like to think that you killed a man. It’s the romantic in me.
Rick: It’s a combination of all three.
We’re not sure if his character ran off with the church funds, ran off with a senator’s wife or killed a man; but what we do know is that the real Humphrey Bogart got his hair clipped at The Hotel Britania along with his famous comrades. The barber’s chair and all the accoutrements that went with that era have been preserved.
Every nook and cranny of the hotel was filled with photos, articles, paintings, books, furniture all alluding to the Portuguese empire. You could almost hear the buzz of Lisbon’s top-ranked spies of the time, or Bond creator Ian Fleming or Kim Philby, later unmasked as a Soviet mole. Everything about it was so deja vu. Then there was Garbo. Look it up.
We parted ways with Lisbon and moved on to Porto. As Hollywood on the Potomac would say – Here’s looking at you, kid.
