The is­land of Crete at­tracted af­flu­ent for­eign vis­i­tors with an in­ter­est in its his­tory and ar­chae­ol­ogy as early as the Ot­toman era, known in the lit­er­a­ture as Peri­ig­ites (trav­ellers). Since the time of the In­de­pen­dence of Crete, and es­pe­cially af­ter the is­land was united with the rest of Greece, the num­ber of those vis­it­ing Her­ak­lion rose im­pres­sively. The new po­lit­i­cal con­di­tions forced of­fi­cials to travel of­ten; eco­nomic growth was noted and nu­mer­ous mer­chants vis­ited the city; trav­el­ling to Crete by ship was bet­ter or­ga­nized and the char­ac­ter of the voy­ages grad­u­ally changed. The need for proper shel­ter for the vis­i­tors was a promi­nent is­sue and the first well-or­ga­nized ho­tels were es­tab­lished as early as the first decade of the 20th c.

Af­ter the great mas­sacre of 1898, the 25th of Au­gust Mar­tyrs’ Av­enue in Her­ak­lion was dec­o­rated mainly with large build­ings that fol­lowed the lines of Athen­ian Neo­clas­si­cism and Eclec­ti­cism, leav­ing be­hind all things re­lated to the ar­chi­tec­tural mor­phol­ogy of the East. Along this main road, which leads from the old port to the cen­ter of the city, the first lux­u­ri­ous ho­tels of Her­ak­lion were built, de­signed by im­por­tant ar­chi­tects of the time, such as Dim­itrios Kyr­i­akos.

Ar­ti­cles and ref­er­ences in the lo­cal pa­pers pre­sented im­por­tant as­pects of the emer­gence and de­vel­op­ment of Greek tourism and the func­tion of the lo­cal ho­tels, the ser­vices they of­fered to their clients and the com­pe­ti­tion be­tween them.

In this pa­per, the re­sults of archival and bib­li­o­graph­i­cal re­search are pre­sented for the first time, high­light­ing the role of ho­tels in Her­ak­lion’s every­day life, through the study of their ar­chi­tec­ture, lo­cal news­pa­pers clip­pings and the archives of the Greek Tourism Or­ga­ni­za­tion.