More than 100 guests were forced out of their rooms in the middle of the night after fire broke out at the Botanic Sanctuary Antwerp, the five-star luxury hotel on Leopoldstraat in the centre of Antwerp, beside the city's botanical garden.
The Antwerp fire brigade was called at 4:24 a.m. in the night of Tuesday into Wednesday. According to VRT NWS, the fire started in a separate part of the hotel — its wellness zone, in the area of the gym and the pool — and the evacuation of the building was ordered as a precaution while crews checked for fire and smoke.
The guests who had been brought out into the street did not have to stay there. They were given shelter across the road in the cafeteria of the ZAS Elisabeth hospital, directly opposite the hotel, while firefighters worked through the building. A medical intervention plan was also declared during the night as a precaution, Het Nieuwsblad reported.
Firefighters brought the blaze under control quickly, De Standaard reported. But the damage was already done: according to Het Laatste Nieuws, the hotel's wellness section was seriously damaged, its windows blackened and gutted by the fire. By the morning, the evacuated guests were allowed to return to their rooms.
Remarkably, for a fire that emptied a full hotel at the dead of night, nobody was hurt. Every report from the scene says there were no injuries.
What started the fire is not yet known. The Antwerp fire zone says an investigation into the cause will follow, and any decision on possible restrictions to the hotel's operations will only be taken once the damage has been fully assessed. There has been no final official account yet of the cause, the full extent of the damage, or which parts of the hotel are affected.
The Botanic Sanctuary is one of Belgium's best-known luxury hotels — a 108-room, five-star superior property built into a restored former monastery complex next to Antwerp's Botanical Garden, a member of The Leading Hotels of the World, and home to Michelin-starred restaurants. Its three-storey Botanic Health Spa, with its 18-metre pool, saunas and fitness club, is the very part of the hotel the fire has now hit.
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