The One Monumental Palace is the 1923 building on Avenida dos Aliados where Porto once took its coffee at the Café Monumental, restored by the French Maison Albar group and opened as a hotel in late 2018. The façade is neoclassical and deliberately grand, and behind it the building has been most things: a café that opened with the building, the Pensão Monumental upstairs, and in the 1930s a room where Porto danced to an orchestra. H10 Hotels bought it in November 2025 and changed the name, but the fabric is the same: Portuguese marble floors, high ceilings, Art Deco lamps and an American Bar that plays the 1920s straight.
There are 63 rooms and 13 suites, 76 in all, across nine categories, and what separates them is floor area and which way you look. Superior and Deluxe are both 29 square metres. Grand Deluxe City Views is the only room category sold on its view, and the view it promises is Porto, not the avenue. Above that the suites climb through the Grand Deluxe at 45 square metres and the Tower Duplex at 62 to the Monumental Suite at 87. On the ground floor The Mezzanine handles breakfast and brunch, and the bar is where the period detail survives most intact.
Le Monument holds one Michelin star in the 2026 guide, its fourth in a row. Julien Montbabut, who earned a star in Paris before moving here, cooks a region-by-region Portuguese tasting menu on Tuesday to Saturday evenings, offered as Grande Viagem at ten courses, Passeio at six and a newer Caminhada. Yakuza by Olivier does modern Japanese in a second room. Downstairs the Grand Bleu Spa runs to 350 square metres with a heated indoor pool, hammam, dry sauna, three treatment rooms and a 24-hour gym, and all but the treatments are free for guests.
Guests praise the address, the breakfast and the spa, and grumble that the 29 square metre entry rooms feel tight for a five-star rate and that service does not always match the building. Only the Porto Suite is sold as overlooking the avenue, and the avenue carries enough traffic that one thread of feedback mentions noise through the windows. Parking is valet, at a charge the hotel does not publish. From the door you walk to São Bento, Clérigos and Bolhão on the flat, and down to the river in fourteen minutes, which is the real argument for staying here. It suits anyone who wants the grand Porto address and will pay up a category for a room sold on its view.
