A floating hotel 7 floors, with 200 rooms and weight of 10,000 tons capable of hosting hundreds of people: it looks like a bizarre idea, and instead it is theHaegumgang Hotelonce called Four Seasons Barrier Reef Resortan imposing floating structure in operation by 1988 al 2008built in Singapore but which traveled between Australia, Vietnam, and North Korea before being definitively demolished after 20 years of adventures and vicissitudes.
The construction of the Haegumgang Hotel
The idea of a floating hotel was not only moved by the tendency to spectacularization typical of the period, but above all by the will of the Australian administration to encourage tourism towards the Great coral reef through the creation of ad hoc services and structures. At the beginning of 1983 the construction of a building anchored to a large one was proposed barge floating To facilitate access to the coral reef by tourists around the world. After a careful environmental evaluation, the project of the floating hotel, initially called Four Seasons Barrier Reef Resorttook hold, and the works for its realization were started in Singapore in 1986, with an investment of 45 million Australian dollars.
The hotel design, conceived by the Swedish engineer and architect Stench Sjöstrandprovided for a massive and compact rectangular building of 90 meters in length, 27.6 meters in width and almost 25 meters of height.
The designers did not spare themselves in terms of services. The hotel aimed at a high profile offer and certainly not to improvised accommodation: in addition to the approximately 200 rooms For the guests, the hotel included two restaurants, two bars, a disco, a sauna, a library, a projections room, an underwater observatory and a sporting goods store.
In addition to all this, arranged on the extensions of the great barge, there were a swimming pool, tennis courts and an eliport, in addition, of course, to more than a dozen pontiles for mooring smaller boats.
The “travel” of the floating hotel
The hotel was inaugurated in March 1988 with the name of “Four Seasons Barrier Reef Resort” and the title, in all respects, of “First Hotel floating in history”. Towed by Singapore with a ship for heavy loads and transported to John Brewer Reefoff Townsville, in north-eastern Australia, the hotel began its history as a 5-star accommodation facility, in the middle of the ocean, reachable, therefore, only by sea (in about two hours of travel) or by helicopter.
Since its first few months of life, however, the hotel met many difficulties that rapidly undermined the expectations and experiences of the guests. Bad time And cyclones tropicalin fact, they made air and marine transport impossible, completely isolating the structure even for several days and preventing the supply. All without considering the need for expensive maintenance and repair interventions. In addition, a series of unfortunate accidents, such as the fire of a catamaran for the transport and sinking of an appendix of the barge, helped to aggravate the crisis. The Four Seasons Barrier Reef Resort, in heavy loss, was thus put on sale in the same year.
The hotel was then purchased by a Japanese company and towed to Vietnamwhose large boom in the tourism sector in the late 80s was not supported by adequate development of the infrastructure and services necessary. In the 1989Four Seasons Barrier Reef Resort, now renamed Saigon Floating Hotelwas moored at the row of the Saigonin the city of I have who minhbecoming the first five -star hotel and one of the most prestigious structures in the city, as well as the entire country, since it offered exclusive services still not very popular in the Vietnam of those years. The Saigon Floating Hotel lived several years of glory, but the rapid development of Southeast Asiain a short time led the structure to no longer be as competitive as in the past, so much so that it is decided a new closure and a consequent movement to different waters once again in 1996.
The Japanese then sold the hotel to a South Korean company of the Hyundai group, which renamed the structure in Haegumgang Hotel and gave her new life in North Koreathanks to a joint development project between the two cores. Between 2000 and 2008 the Haegumgang Hotel met a certain popularity within the local tourist flows, but the exacerbation of the Relations between North Korea South Koreabrought to definitive abandonment of the structure For tourist purposes.
Although still formally owned by South Korea, the hotel was no longer moved and its use in the following years is not clear due to the closure to the world of North Korea. The hotel demolition order finally arrived in 2019 by the supreme leader Kim Jong awhich did not consider it in line with the local aesthetic sense: it was definitively dismantled in March 2022.
