International Dateline Hotel

The seafront hotel that used to be the largest building in Tonga.

The big concrete block on the seafront just east of the centre — long, low, and unmistakeably 1960s — has been a fixture of Nuku'alofa for sixty years. We do not review hotels here, but the building is part of the city's modern history: every king and queen of recent times has been hosted here, and its destruction in the 2006 riots was the moment the unrest spread beyond the political quarter into the wider town.

The waterfront in front of the hotel is one of the better stretches of coastal road in Nuku'alofa for an evening walk.

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Built in 1966 as the country's first proper international hotel, the Dateline was Tonga's tallest building for decades and the place that hosted nearly every visiting head of state. Burnt out in the 2006 riots and re-opened after a long Chinese-funded reconstruction in 2010, it is now run as a state guesthouse for official visitors.