The story
The Cosmopolitan Hotel and Restaurant anchors Old Town San Diego State Historic Park in the layered building that began in the late 1820s as the adobe casa of Juan Bandini — Californio grandee, politician and host whose daughters' weddings and fandangos made it the social heart of Mexican San Diego — and gained a wooden second storey in 1869 when Albert Seeley made it the Cosmopolitan, a stagecoach hotel on the San Diego–Los Angeles run. Restored meticulously by the state and reopened as a working hotel and restaurant, it serves period dinners beneath original beams. Its telling is house tradition: staff and guests describe a woman in Victorian dress on the stairs and balconies, a gentleman associated in telling with the Bandini era, candle-like lights, voices and laughter from empty rooms, and objects moved in the restaurant — accounts the hotel shares on park ghost programmes, unverified and cherished. The Californio household's story, including its Indigenous and Mexican servants' lives, is told respectfully first. Details from the park's and hotel's official pages.