Grand Hotel Wrocław

One of the first buildings travelers see when they exit Wrocław’s rail station is The Grand Hotel, a building that hung on by a thread through empires and world wars but is now determined to recapture its original grandeur.

Wrocław’s hotel opened as the Hotel du Nord in 1903, bearing a fashionable French name to accompany the hotel’s fashionable Art Nouveau style. But the city wasn’t French, nor was it Polish. It was Breslau, a city in the eastern reaches of the German Empire.

The Siege of Breslau in the final months of World War II left the hotel with little more than its exterior walls. When German Breslau became Polish Wrocław, Soviet-era architects stripped away the hotel’s Art Nouveau flourishes. The city’s most storied hotel operated for decades without the decorative details that once rivaled Parisian grandeur.

This changed when an ambitious renovation project completed in 2025 brought The Grand Hotel back to life. The renovation revived the building’s Art Nouveau ornamentation and the tower that once crowned its silhouette. The hotel was renovated alongside its neighbor, Hotel Piast, whose matching towers form a grand gateway welcoming travelers into Wrocław.