The Hotel Paisano was built for an oil boom that never arrived. Marfa raised the money by subscription, Trost and Trost of El Paso drew the plans, and the hotel opened with a gala on 28 June 1930 into a region whose expected petroleum fortune had not turned up. What sustained it instead was cattle: through the 1930s and 1940s the lobby was where ranchers and buyers did the business of the Marfa plateau. Its second life made it famous. In the summer of 1955 Warner Brothers took the Paisano as headquarters for the filming of Giant, with about three hundred cast and crew arriving in Marfa. The hotel says George Stevens screened the daily rushes in its ballroom. Its clerk that summer, writing in Texas Monthly in 1989, remembered them in the town's disused Palace Theater, and remembered Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson staying in private homes.
What followed was less glamorous. A later owner carved the rooms into timeshares and abandoned the venture, and Presidio County foreclosed for unpaid taxes. It sold in March 2001 on the courthouse steps for about a hundred and eighty five thousand dollars, and by the hotel's account it reopened that November with seventeen rooms. It changed hands again in July 2026 and closed for renovation.
Getting there
30.3123, -104.0223
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