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HISTORIC HOTELS
COLORADO HAS PLENTY OF BEAUTIFUL AND INTERESTING PLACES TO STAY, FROM YURTS AND TIPIS TO CABINS AND COVERED WAGONS, BUT FOR A NIGHT ’S SLEEP WITH A SIDE OF HISTORY, LOOK NO FURTHER THAN ONE OF THE MANY HISTORIC HOTELS AROUND THE STATE
HOTEL COLORADO Glenwood Springs
Opened in 1893 at an astonishing cost of $850,000 (the Beaumont in Ouray, which you’ll read about, opened just six years before and cost less than one tenth of that), Hotel Colorado was the idea of Walter Devereux who thought that the mining town of Defiance, as Glenwood Springs was originally known, needed a dose of European elegance as well as a touch of flamboyance which came in the form of a fountain that shot water 200 feet in the air and a 25-foot indoor waterfall. Such was the grandiose nature of the hotel that it attracted the famous and the infamous including Teddy Roosevelt, Molly Brown and Al Capone (who is said to have used a secret tunnel to smuggle liquor into the hotel during prohibition), among others.
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