City Hotel Nieuw Minerva

The building itself has a great story to tell. One of the most influential Dutch politicians of the 19th century once lived in one of the houses that now make up City Hotel Nieuw Minerva. “Johan Rudolph Thorbecke, chairman of the
commission that wrote the Constitution of the Netherlands in 1848, boarded here for several years when he was a student at Leiden University,” tells the hotel owner, Jet Bos. And there is more; Bos reveals that the bed in Nieuw Minerva’s Stately Room actually once belonged to Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, the younger brother of Napoléon Bonaparte, who was the King of Holland from 1806 to 1810.