Qualla: Winter Palace Hotel

Winter Palace Hotel: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karen Green, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the winter of 1922 and 1923, the crowd outside a Luxor hotel learned the news the way everyone did that season: from a noticeboard. Howard Carter, the archaeologist who had just opened the tomb of Tutankhamun, used the board at the Winter Palace to dole out his bulletins to the press and the curious. The world's reporters had decamped to its terrace, cabling dispatches back to London and New York between drinks. The hotel had been built for exactly this kind of moment - a stage for the great age of Nile tourism - though no one in 1907 could have guessed its noticeboard would carry the most famous archaeological announcement in history.

Read more: Winter Palace Hotel on Qualla

Image: Karen Green | CC BY-SA 2.0

Winter Palace Hotel: Built for the Season

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marc Ryckaert, CC BY 3.0. The hotel opened on a Saturday in January 1907, and its name tells you who it was for. Wealthy Europeans came to Upper Egypt to escape their own winters, and they wanted a palace to come back to after a day among the tombs. The Upper Egypt Hotels Company - founded in 1905 by the ...

Read more: Winter Palace Hotel on Qualla

Image: Marc Ryckaert | CC BY 3.0

Winter Palace Hotel: Carter's Patron and Carter's Noticeboard

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roland Unger, CC BY-SA 3.0. From its first season, one guest mattered more than the rest to history. George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, came to Luxor for his health and stayed for the antiquities, and he became the patron who financed Howard Carter's long, patient search for an undisturbed royal t...

Read more: Winter Palace Hotel on Qualla

Image: Roland Unger | CC BY-SA 3.0

Winter Palace Hotel: The Guests Who Came After

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marie Thérèse Hébert & Jean Robert Thibault from Québec, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0. Carnarvon was not the only famous name to walk the gardens. Albert I, King of the Belgians, and his wife Queen Elisabeth stayed at the Winter Palace more than once - Albert was a serious mountaineer and a king who preferred quiet travel to ceremony. The crime writer Agatha Christ...

Read more: Winter Palace Hotel on Qualla

Image: Marie Thérèse Hébert & Jean Robert Thibault from Québec, Canada | CC BY-SA 2.0

Winter Palace Hotel: Still on the Corniche

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Olaf Tausch, CC BY 3.0. More than a century on, the Winter Palace is still here, and still working. The original Palace wing - the historic core, with 86 rooms and a handful of suites - was joined in 1996 by a garden annex, the Pavillon, sharing the pools, tennis courts, and terraces. A 1970s addition c...

Read more: Winter Palace Hotel on Qualla

Image: Olaf Tausch | CC BY 3.0