Casino de la Selva, Cuernavaca
Under The Volcano :
"Palatial, a certain air of desolate splendour pervades it. For it is no longer a Casino. You may not even dice for drinks in the bar. The ghosts of ruined gamblers haunt it. No one ever seems to swim in the magnifcent Olympic pool. The springboards stand empty and mournful. It's jai-alai courts are grass-grown and deserted. Two tennis courts only are kept up in the season....."
The hotel was demolished in 2001-2. A Costco warehouse was built on the site.
Carlos Salinas de Gortari was President of Mexico from 1988 to 1994
The hotel's literary reputation was established one day in 1939 when a hungover British writer named Malcolm Lowry sat down in the patio bar and ordered a drink. Mad on mezcal, Lowry wrote Under the Volcano, perhaps the most monumental Mexican nightmare ever crafted by a foreigner, while in residence at the hotel—the book begins on the Day of the Dead 1939 at the Casino de la Selva, where it ends tragically the next morning. Lowry's aura was so tied to the hotel, that when in 1984 John Huston finally realized his life-long dream of filming this dense, luminescent novel, he moved into the Casino and shot many scenes there.
See more photos from Nicnac1000's photostream relating to Lowry
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