For many people, one of the items in their bucket list is to be in two places at the same time. Normally, that is achieved by going to a place where there’s a state or a country line and you would stand on the border line, one leg in one place and one leg in the other. Snap lots of pictures and off you go. A hotel in Europe lets you do just that, but savor that cool moment for a little longer.
The Hotel Arbez is a charming French-Swiss hotel built right on the border of France and Switzerland in the village of La Cure. It is the only hotel in the world that sits on the border of two countries.
The hotel’s restaurant is also divided, one side serving French food, and the other serving Swiss specialties. In some of the rooms, you can sleep with your head in France and your feet in Switzerland. If you’re traveling as a couple, you can be both be at different countries while sharing the same bed in the honeymoon suite. That’s because the border sits right in the middle of the bed.
Besides being a super cool place, the Hotel Arbez has also a really interesting historic background. Before becoming the idyllic hotel it is today, it was formerly a bar and grocery store, built to profit from the weakly enforced cross-border trade of tobacco, alcohol and of course, chocolate.
In 1921 the Hotel Arbez was born and since then, it has seen it’s fair share of history being unveiled right through its walls. During World War II, fugitives and members of the French Resistance occupied the hotel’s upper floor. Since the only stairway to the second floor crossed the Swiss border halfway up, German soldiers in Nazi occupied France could not enter neutral Switzerland, and the whole second floor became a safe haven for those being persecuted.
In 1962 the second floor was used again to make history. This time, Algerian freedom fighters retreated to the upstairs floor at the Albez while a treaty was negotiated to end civil war in Algeria, called the Evian Accords.
This is the perfect location to check one more thing off your bucket list, or if you don’t have one, put two more pins on your travel map.
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