Copacabana Palace, A Belmond Hotel, Rio de Janeiro

This guide to the Copacabana Palace in Rio de Janeiro traces a single year, 1923, when a fishermen's colony and this white palace opened on the very same stretch of sand. It reaches back to the Tupi people who named the cove for the herons that once worked its dunes, and to the French architect who built a Riviera dream where storks had picked through scrub only a generation earlier. A tunnel had connected this shoreline to the rest of the city only a generation before the hotel rose, when the beach was still a fishing ground barely five years old.