Page 62 - LIBRO PALACE HOTEL MADRID

El hotel contó con su propio equipo de fútbol.
The hotel had its own football team.
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ma permanente unas habitaciones en el Palace para él y su servicio, solicitó la del chófer, situada en la planta superior del edi cio, con la condi- ción de que fuera de por vida. March aceptó y, de esta forma, Camba pasó a ser un personaje liga- do al hotel, en el que vivió hasta su muerte.
En la década 1950 el Palace seguía siendo ese «obligado y ostentoso hospedaje de industriales y comerciantes en alza, de cónsules y agregados extranjeros, de insignes literatos y conferencian- tes de moda, de joyeros particulares en función de ofertas particulares, de turistas alocados y altiparlantes en veinte idiomas, de actores y ac- trices de fama en tournée por España, de agentes de Bolsa o negocios citados allí con clientes du- bitativos, de acaparadores de contratas inmobi- liarias», como lo describió Federico Carlos Sáinz Robles, cronista o cial de la Villa de Madrid.
El hotel contaba en ese momento con cerca de 1.000 empleados —tenían su propio equipo de fútbol, de los que tan sólo 150 estaban en lencería y lavandería, y se había dotado de un servicio de guardería infantil y de una enfermería con todo lo indispensable para practicar los primeros auxilios.
prison employees. For this reason, once the Civil War was over, a grateful March told Camba he could ask for whatever he wished; the columnist, aware that March had some rooms permanently reserved in the Palace for himself and his service, asked for the room of the chau eur located on the upper oor of the building, on the condition that it be his for life. March accepted and, in this way, Camba became a gure linked to the hotel, where he lived until his death.
In the 1950s, the Palace continued to be the ‘ob- ligatory and ostentatious lodgings for rising in- dustrialists and merchants, for foreign attachés and consuls, for distinguished literary gures and fashionable lecturers, for private jewellers working for private sales, for loud, crazed tour- ists speaking in 20 languages, for famous actors and actresses on their tours of Spain, for stock brokers and businessmen called to meet there by dubious clients, for hoarders of real estate con- tracts,’ as Madrid’s o cial chronicler, Federico Carlos Sáinz Robles described it.
The hotel now had nearly 1,000 employees (it had its own football team), 150 of whom worked in the linens and laundry service alone, and included a new service for childcare and an in- rmary equipped with everything necessary to perform rst aid.