The Hotel was built in the 1920’s, and was dedicated to the most prosperous visitors to the resort and the Sopot casino goers. “Kasino Hotel”, as it was called at the time, was designed by architects of the Gdańsk University of Technology and was the main project of the Sopot authorities during the interwar period. Its construction did not avoid scandals. First someone noticed its similarity to some other hotel built a decade earlier in Szczawnio-Zdrój in Lower Silesia. The plagiarism accusations were withdrawn following a settlement. Moreover, after a few years it turned out that serious financial malpractices occurred during its construction in which the representatives of local authorities participated. This led to the arrest and consequently the suicide of the Sopot Chief Mayor.
The unfortunate beginnings were fast forgotten with the hotel efficiently fulfilling its function. As the most elegant, exclusive and expensive hotel in Sopot, it offered services at the highest levels and welcomed guests who were members of the Worlds economic and political high class circles, including royalty. The “Kasino Hotel” was also a venue of great historical events. The elegant rooms and hotel halls hosted in 1939 the German commanders who organised the attack on Gdynia and Hel Peninsula. The Hel defenders signed their capitulation there after two months of holding flanks under German attack. Even before that, Adolf Hitler was a guest and made the hotel his main quarters. At the end of WWII the hotel had a more tragic episode of being an army hospital and after the Russians arrived in Sopot it became the Red Army headquarters. Its traditional function was however quite quickly regained with the change of its name to “The Grand Hotel”. Thanks to its legendary status and high standards over the post war years it retained the specific pre-war character enjoyed by the diminished members of the long-gone era.
Since the sixties Sopot’s “Grand” has also been the venue for cultural events. “Czerwone Gitary” made their debut there in 1961. In the hotel many films were made and radio programmes recorded, and it also hosted prestigious conferences. Participants in the annual song festival in Sopot found their accommodation in the Grand Hotel. At the beginning of the nineties a casino was opened in the hotel, which remains an attractive feature of the place these days, as opposed to its previously being the reason for its construction and the justification of its existence. The guest list of “The Grand”, apart from the previously-mentioned Nazi Germany leader, also included Marlena Dietrich, Fidel Castro, Jan Kiepura, Reza Pahlavi and hundreds of other celebrities from the last hundred years.
Today’s five-star “Grand Hotel” still maintains its representative and most elegant hotel status in Sopot, and is used by the most important and wealthiest guests from the region.
