Caravelle Hotel

Last crawled date: 1 year, 12 months ago

The Caravelle Hotel is located in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The hotel was opened to the public on Christmas Eve 1959, when the city was known as Saigon. Contemporary journalists noted its use of Italian marble, bullet-proof glass and a “state-of-the-art air-conditioning system and a Berliet private generator.” The hotel’s modern design was the work of two architects, one French, one Vietnamese. During the 1960s The Caravelle was home to the Australian Embassy, the New Zealand Embassy, and the Saigon bureaus of, NBC, ABC and CBS. On the morning of August 25, 1964 at around 11:30 am a bomb exploded in room 514, on a floor occupied mostly by foreign journalists, who were all out on assignment. Nine rooms were damaged, windows were blown out of several cars parked in the street, and a number of people were injured without fatalities. Following the Fall of Saigon in 1975, the hotel was taken over and operated by the government and renamed the Doc Lap (Independence) Hotel. And so it remained until 1998, when the Caravelle name was relaunched. The original ten-storey building is now adjoined to a 24-storey tower that forms the bulk of the new property. However, the iconic Saigon Bar has changed little since 1959. #Caravelle #Ho_Chi_Minh_City #hotel #Saigon #vietnam