Hotel Del Salto: The brutal story of Colombia’s suicide hotel
It says a lot about how much AI is destroying the world that, of all the ills it’s causing society, making people doubt anything beautiful they see in the world doesn’t even break the top ten.
It’s true, though. At least, whenever I see something spectacular online, my first thought is, “That must be AI”.
More often than not these days, I’m right. Wonderfully enough, though, the first time I saw pictures of Colombia’s Hotel Del Salto, I thought exactly that, and I was wrong. It turns out, some beautiful things can exist in this cursed world, and the Hotel Del Salto, perched right on the edge of a cliff face in the small village of San Antonio del Tecendama and directly facing the Tecendama waterfall, is one of them.
That beauty is only really in its look, though. The closer you look, a darker story of societal decay, suicide and possible hauntings starts to bleed through, starting with the reason the hotel closed decades ago. The hotel opened in 1923 as a pet project of the then-president of Colombia, Pedro Nel Ospina. Built to resemble a French palace, the Hotel Del Salto was meant to be the height of Colombian luxury, only accessible by train and extremely expensive.
Despite this, it flourished until the mid-1970s, when two things happened that kneecapped the whole endeavour. The first was that the waterfall itself began to recede. Not the end of the world, it was still visible, and the rest of the view was still basically incomparable. However, the receding waterfall exposed the reality of the Bogota River it fell into, which in the 1970s had become one of the most contaminated in the world. Consisting mainly of sewage and stinking to the high heavens.
Needless to say, the rich folks who had previously summered in the hotel stayed away, and a very specific kind of clientele replaced them.
How did the suicide hotel get its reputation?
Suddenly, the only people who were showing up at the Hotel Del Salto were people who were interested in it as a place that they could easily jump off a cliff from.
The plan seemed to be simple. Head down, spend a few days living in luxury if you don’t mind the smell. If you did, you could just skip straight to the final act of leaping from your room onto the cliffs below. Hopefully you’d be dead before you hit the river, cos if you weren’t… Crivens.
Needless to say, this wasn’t the kind of clientele the hotel’s owners wanted arriving there. At one point, they tried opening a police station across the road from the hotel as a way of discouraging people from taking their lives there. This wasn’t to be, though. The hotel fell into disarray and was finally abandoned. That’s when the mythology started springing up around the hotel, and if you took one look at it, you wouldn’t be surprised. It’s a spectacular place for a ghost story.
It was said that those who took their lives ended up still in their rooms, wandering the halls of the Hotel Del Salto for years to come. One wonders what they must have thought when the building was renovated in the early 2000s. After the River Bogota was cleaned out in the late 1990s, the hotel was safe for people to go near again and is now open today! Not as a museum, but, quite fittingly, as the Tequendama Falls Museum of Biodiversity and Culture.
The happiest kind of ending of all, one that isn’t an ending at all, but the start of a whole new story for a building so accustomed to tragedy.