13 Cities
City Guides
Every grand room sits inside a place with its own calendar and character — a spa season, a film festival, a wartime history. Start with the city, and work in toward the tables.
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.
Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden shares Baden-Baden's thermal-town heritage but carries a sharper literary association: Dostoevsky's ruinous 1865 losses at the Kurhaus tables here are widely credited as the direct spark for The Gambler, written the following year to pay off the resulting debts.
Estoril
Estoril's casino carries the most unusual wartime history in this entire atlas: neutral Portugal's coastline became a crowded waiting room for exiled European royalty and intelligence operatives from both sides during the Second World War, and the casino was their evening meeting ground.
Lisbon
Where Estoril carries decades of wartime intrigue, Lisbon's own casino is an entirely modern proposition: a glass-and-steel pavilion built in Parque das Nações for the 1998 World Exposition, standing among the district's other Expo-era landmarks along the Tagus waterfront.
London
London's casino scene sits apart from the continental pattern in this atlas: rather than a single grand civic house, the city holds a scattered handful of licensed casinos ranging from large, theatrical West End venues to small, formal private members' clubs.
Amsterdam
The Netherlands legalised land-based casinos only in the early 1970s, and its market has been shaped ever since by Holland Casino, the state-linked operator whose Amsterdam flagship anchors the country's regulated gaming sector.
Deauville
Deauville was built, more or less on purpose, as Normandy's answer to the Riviera — a fashionable seaside resort for wealthy Parisians, with a distinctive Anglo-Norman architectural signature (half-timbered gables, dark and white facades) shared across its grand hotels and its 1912 casino.
Baden bei Wien
Baden bei Wien, a Habsburg-era spa town in the wooded hills just south of Vienna, hosts the founding casino of Casinos Austria, the state-linked operator now responsible for the country's national network of licensed houses.
St Julian's
St Julian's holds one of the more visually jarring contrasts in this atlas: the nineteenth-century Dragonara Palace, built for the banking Marquis Giorgio Scicluna and converted into a casino in 1964, sits on a rocky seafront point directly amid the high-rise hotels, bars, and clubs of Paceville, Malta's densest modern nightlife district.
Barcelona
Barcelona's casino is a product of the city's late-1980s reinvention ahead of the 1992 Olympic Games: a modern harbourfront building inside the World Trade Center at Port Vell, with none of the historic pedigree of the atlas's older entries but a genuinely distinctive maritime setting, looking out over the old port's marina toward the wider Mediterranean.