Historic hospitality.

• Author: Holston, Mark
• Position: Americas iojo!

IN 1889, IN THE REMOTE Chilean town of Temuco, a regional trade center in the homeland of the Mapuche Indians some 420 miles south of the capital of Santiago, the Hotel Continental opened its doors for business. Remarkably, 115 years later, the venerable two-story establishment is still serving the public with an assortment of simple rooms and suites, a bar that's frequently packed with revelers celebrating weddings and family reunions, and a 150-seat, French-style dining room that serves cuisine still held in high regard by locals.

Although the stairs creak, the rooms can be drafty and cold, and frequent rainstorms pelting the tin roof create a deafening din, the hotel remains a traditional favorite among Chile's elite. Jose Briones, the hotel's accountant, proudly relates that every Chilean head of state since its opening has stayed at the Continental. With one notable exception--military strongman General Angusto Pinochet, he claims, never set foot in the building. But Salvador Allende, the president overthrown by Pinochet in the 1973 coup, enjoyed stays at the hotel (he preferred, according to hotel legend, room number eleven, as did Aguirre Cerda, who served as president from 1938 to 1941). Even Chile's current president, Ricardo Lagos, has graced the aging establishment and kept the tradition alive.

Not only presidents have found the Continental to their liking; poets took a fancy to it as well. Pablo Neruda, the country's famed Nobel Prize winner in Literature, grew up in Temuco and was partial to room nine, while the country's other Nobel Literature Laureate, Gabriela Mistral, as the story goes, favored adjoining room ten.

Briones, who began his career at the...