Hotel Continental, Saigon/HoChiMinh City

Very near the Saigon Opera House is the Hotel Continental, the oldest hotel in all of Vietnam. It is named for the Hotel Continental in Paris, an ode to the city's French colonial past.

The hotel was built in 1880 and has operated continuously to this day. When it was conceived, the Hotel Continental's goal was to provide traveling French businesspeople a taste of home after their long journey. During this period, many French-colonial buildings were constructed. The Notre Dame Cathedral, the Postal and Telecom Service building, and the Hotel de Ville are all built in the same style.

During the Colonial period and the First Indochina War, the hotel was a meeting place for journalists and politicians. More recently, during the Vietnam War in the 1970s, the same became true again. Time and Newsweek both kept their Saigon bureaux at the Hotel Continental. Hunter S. Thompson worked as a war correspondent here, based in room 37.

The hotel was renovated in the late 1980s and is presently owned and run by the city government.