Grande Hotel Beira

The Grande Hotel of Beira is a vast, ruined luxury hotel from the 1950s, built as one of the most opulent resorts in colonial Africa with hundreds of rooms, an Olympic pool and grand public halls. Financially unviable and closed within years, it fell into decay through the civil war and is now occupied by thousands of squatters who have made a community within its crumbling concrete frame. The stripped, graffiti-covered shell has become a haunting symbol of colonial ambition and post-independence hardship.