50 Abandoned Hotels That Are Frozen in Time

48. Hotel Esplanade – Berlin, Germany

A jewel of Berlin’s pre-war elegance, Hotel Esplanade opened in 1908 with opulent ballrooms, marble staircases, and ornate salons that embodied turn-of-the-century luxury. World War II air raids nearly destroyed it, but remarkably, the Kaisersaal—the Imperial Room—survived. While most of the hotel lies in ruin or has been built over, the Kaisersaal was carefully preserved and relocated piece by piece into a modern mall. The surrounding fragments still exist: ghostly mosaics, carved stonework, staircases to nowhere. It’s a rare case where decay and preservation exist side by side—history frozen, yet somehow still breathing beneath the city’s modern gloss.