It's difficult to say when a hotel goes from being just a place to sleep to a destination in itself, but using 10-metre python skins as wall hangings is a pretty good place to start.
'The plantation workers killed them while clearing land in the 1890s,' says Louis Demurs, caretaker of Bolivia's Residencial Sorata, a creaky old colonial-era hotel in the medieval mountain town of Sorata, 100km north of La Paz.
Short and bearded, with a gnome-like mien and impenetrable accent, the French-Canadian Demurs is a trove of information about his beloved hotel, the history of which reads like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez epic. Originally built in the 1830s, the building was expanded during a 60-year period by a series of German agriculturalists, starting with the Richters, who became rich from planting cinchona, the bark of which was used to make quinine. Cinchona made the Richters one of Bolivia's most influential families.
A fortune was spent on the family home's white facade and high-ceilinged foyer, with most of the work done by Richter's architect, a mason whose idiosyncratic touches - sirens with serpents in their hair, for example - instilled in the locals a firm belief that the owners were satanists.
Because Sorata was ideally positioned for La Paz, the cinchona plantations and the nearby goldfields of Mapiri, the town began making mountains of money. Then came the rubber boom of the late 1880s and with it a Hapsburg businessman named Ernesto Gunther, who bought the Richter mansion and replaced the cinchona fields with rubber trees. Gunther used his profits to start an export-import business, bringing in everything from French champagne to chandeliers. 'As the house became more and more luxurious, it became a virtual de facto office of state,' says Demurs. 'Everyone stayed here, kings and politicians.'
But Gunther was also greedy. From 1895 to 1904 he was in partnership with Elvin Berg, a Norwegian who managed the plantations. When Berg was accused of killing workers from a neighbouring farm during a border dispute, he fled to Cusco, Peru, and the German took the opportunity to shut his partner out of the business. Berg remained in Cusco, becoming a rubber and beer magnate, but Gunther floundered.
