JUST over a century ago, a young British steamboat captain, William Clarke, fell head-over-heels in love while passing a rocky promontory in Macau.
The vision that captured his heart was a hillside mansion overlooking Praia Grande Bay. Clarke and his wife, Catherine, bought the property and converted it into a hotel. They called it the Boa Vista, meaning 'good view'.
Until the turn of the century, the hotel flourished. It was advertised as 'unsurpassed in the Far East' and distinguished guests included Hong Kong's then-governor, Sir William Robinson.
Two world wars disturbed the fortunes of the Boa Vista but, by the 1960s, romance was in the air there again.
By now it had been re-named the Bela Vista (the view improving from good to beautiful) and the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy wrote: 'It is a magical place. It is a mythological place. It is somewhere which one cannot believe has no fantastic legend to its name.
'When I was registering, I found myself trying to remember in which book I had read about it . . . in which film I had seen it . . . what famous remark by Bogart, Bacall or Loretta Young had secretly made it immortal.' The Bela Vista did eventually make it into the movies. Sir Peter Ustinov stopped there to film the Jules Verne novel, Around the World in Eighty Days, but, by this time, the hotel had fallen on hard times.
