An Atlas of Europe's Casino Houses
Grand Rooms
A field guide to the continent's land-based gaming houses — where the belle-époque salons still stand, what a visit is actually like, and how to walk through the door correctly dressed.
Featured Plates
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Casino de Monte-Carlo
Monte Carlo, Monaco
The atrium and gaming rooms Charles Garnier built for Princess Caroline's vision of a resort of last resort — still the reference point for what a European casino house is supposed to look like.
- Founded
- 1863
- Style
- Belle Époque
- Dress
- Smart, elegant dress throughout
- Min. Age
- 18
Casinò di Venezia
Venice, Italy
Chartered in 1638 as the Ridotto, this is the oldest continuously licensed casino in the world — a title it now holds across two very different addresses on the lagoon.
- Founded
- 1638
- Style
- Renaissance palazzo
- Dress
- Smart casual is acceptable in the main rooms
- Min. Age
- 18
Casino de Spa
Spa, Belgium
Chartered in 1763, this is one of the oldest gaming houses in the world and a direct source of the very word "casino" as it is used across Europe today.
- Founded
- 1763
- Style
- Neoclassical spa pavilion
- Dress
- Smart casual throughout
- Min. Age
- 21
Casino Baden-Baden
Baden-Baden, Germany
Marlene Dietrich reportedly called it the most beautiful casino in the world; its French-style rooms inside the Kurhaus were modelled in part on the great châteaux of the Ancien Régime.
- Founded
- 1824
- Style
- French Rococo / Kurhaus
- Dress
- Jacket required for men in the evening
- Min. Age
- 18
Casino Estoril
Estoril, Portugal
Long billed as one of Europe's largest casinos, and the wartime Lisbon-coast gaming room where exiled royalty and Allied and Axis spies mixed — a direct inspiration for Ian Fleming's Casino Royale.
- Founded
- 1916
- Style
- Modernist (1960s rebuild)
- Dress
- Smart casual is generally acceptable
- Min. Age
- 18
Casino Barrière de Deauville
Deauville, France
The grand seaside casino that helped define Deauville as the fashionable Normandy resort of the Belle Époque, immortalised in Marcel Proust's fictional Balbec.
- Founded
- 1912
- Style
- Belle Époque / Anglo-Norman
- Dress
- Smart dress expected
- Min. Age
- 18
Browse by Country
Twenty-four venues, sixteen countries — from the Belle Époque salons of the Riviera to a modernist tower on a Swiss lakeshore.
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Holland Casino Amsterdam
Amsterdam, Netherlands
The flagship house of Holland Casino, the state-affiliated operator that runs the Netherlands' legal land-based casinos — a large, modern gaming floor rather than a period piece.
- Founded
- 1991
- Style
- Contemporary riverside building
- Dress
- Smart casual required
- Min. Age
- 18
Grand Casino Baden
Baden, Switzerland
A modern Swiss gaming house in a historic thermal town on the Limmat, built after Switzerland's mid-1990s reform legalised casinos beyond its handful of older establishments.
- Founded
- 1994
- Style
- Contemporary spa-town casino
- Dress
- Smart casual required
- Min. Age
- 18
Casino Baden
Baden bei Wien, Austria
The founding house of Casinos Austria, set inside a Habsburg-era spa town's Kurpark just south of Vienna, and long favoured by the imperial court as a summer retreat.
- Founded
- 1934
- Style
- Neoclassical spa pavilion
- Dress
- Smart casual is generally acceptable
- Min. Age
- 18
Casino Baden-Baden
Baden-Baden, Germany
Marlene Dietrich reportedly called it the most beautiful casino in the world; its French-style rooms inside the Kurhaus were modelled in part on the great châteaux of the Ancien Régime.
- Founded
- 1824
- Style
- French Rococo / Kurhaus
- Dress
- Jacket required for men in the evening
- Min. Age
- 18
Casino Barcelona
Barcelona, Spain
A modern harbourfront casino inside Barcelona's World Trade Center, opened for the 1992 Olympic-era transformation of the city's old port.
- Founded
- 1988
- Style
- Contemporary harbourfront tower
- Dress
- Smart casual
- Min. Age
- 18
Casinò di Campione
Campione d'Italia, Italy
A vast Mario Botta-designed tower rising from a tiny Italian exclave inside Switzerland — for decades marketed as one of Europe's largest casinos by floor area.
- Founded
- 1917
- Style
- Modernist tower (2007 rebuild)
- Dress
- Smart casual is generally accepted
- Min. Age
- 18
City Guides
All cities →Every venue in this atlas sits inside a place with its own character — a resort calendar, a spa season, a wartime history. The city guides cover what surrounds the gaming floor.
Monte Carlo
Monte Carlo is, more than any other place in this atlas, a town built around a single casino.
Venice
Venice's relationship with gambling is older than any other city in this atlas — the Republic licensed the Ridotto in 1638 specifically to move Carnival-season gaming out of unregulated private palazzi, four centuries before "regulated gaming" became a policy phrase anywhere else.
Spa
Spa gave the world the word "spa," and its casino — chartered in 1763 — is close to a founding document of the entire genre of resort-town gaming houses this atlas is built around.
Baden-Baden
Baden-Baden built its whole identity around the pairing of thermal baths and its casino, and the town's Kurhaus — the building housing both — is arguably the single most ornately decorated casino interior in this atlas, modelled directly on Versailles and Fontainebleau by the Bénazet family in the nineteenth century.