Everyone is the oldest. Nobody has the receipts.

This is the entry where two official bodies disagree about the same building, in public, and have done for years. The casino calls itself le plus vieux casino du monde and dates from 1763. The Walloon regional government dates the opening to 1771 and calls it the first modern casino in Europe, which is a smaller and much more careful claim.

Both are describing real events. In 1763 the town of Spa refused the project and four private investors picked it up. The theatre followed in 1769, the ballroom in 1770, and La Redoute opened in 1771. So 1763 is the privilege and 1771 is the door. Whichever you prefer, you are choosing a definition, not a fact.

What cannot be said in either version is "continuously operating since 1763". Play here was banned twice, in 1872 and again in 1902, and during that stretch the building worked as a hospital and as an orphanage. Their own About page says so.

Nor is the building Georgian. A fire in February 1917 took the interiors. The facade dates from 1905 to 1907 and is a replica of the facade of 1784; the interiors were rebuilt between 1917 and 1929. Alban Chambon did the first work, Marcel Hansen and Marcel Paes the rest. Barthélemy Digneffe designed the original that none of it survives from.

Two bans, a fire, a period as a hospital, a replica facade, and a headline date that the regional authority contradicts by eight years. The history is genuine and the slogan is not carrying it.

Wiesbaden dates from 1771 and plays in a building from 1907. The gap between those two numbers is where the interesting part lives.

The imperial ban of 1872 closed it, along with Baden-Baden and most of the German spa towns, and it stayed closed for 77 years. It came back on 29 October 1949, but not here: play reopened in the foyer of the Hessisches Staatstheater, next door. It only moved into the Kurhaus on 3 November 1955.

The Kurhaus itself is Friedrich von Thiersch's, opened in 1907 and inaugurated with Wilhelm II in attendance. The portal carries the words AQUIS MATTIACIS, the Roman name for the waters here, and the columns are Corinthian. We mention this because a good deal of travel writing puts a different word on that portal and the wrong order on those columns, and both are easy to check by standing in front of it.

Dostoevsky, briefly, and honestly

He was here in 1862, in 1863, from 2 August to the end of September 1865 when he got stuck after losing, and again in 1871. That is as far as the record goes. The Gambler was written in Russia and finished on 30 October 1866 in twenty-six days, not in this town, and Roulettenburg is not provably Wiesbaden: Bad Homburg and Baden-Baden claim it just as loudly and there is no consensus. The city itself is careful about this. So are we.

Seventy-seven years dark, a comeback in a theatre foyer, and six more years before it got back into the building it is named after. An honest, well-documented history that does not support a continuity claim.

The youngest of the four northern claims and, by our reckoning, the one with the most real old fabric still doing its old job. Play began on 16 June 1812, in the building of the former Jesuit college. In 1824 Friedrich Weinbrenner rebuilt the Promenadehaus into the Conversationshaus, which is the Kurhaus you walk into now.

Then the tenants, who are the story: Bernard and de Ballathier from 1812 to 1821, Chabert from 1824 to 1838, and from 1838 Jacques Bénazet, followed by his son Édouard. The Bénazet years are the Belle Époque ones, and they are what Charles Séchan was hired for. Séchan was a Paris theatre decorator, and between 1851 and 1855 he did the gaming rooms as stage sets: Corinthian columns, a frieze of paired griffins. Those rooms are still the rooms.

The imperial ban stopped play on 31 October 1872. It came back on 3 October 1933, the first post-ban concession in Germany, and then again on 1 April 1950 after the war. We have the two reopening dates and not the closing one in between, which is why that stretch is drawn as unmeasured on our timeline rather than guessed at.

One correction worth making, because it is repeated everywhere: this is not a town with a concessionaire. The operator is Baden-Württembergische Spielbanken GmbH & Co. KG, which has run it since 2003 and has been a subsidiary of the state of Baden-Württemberg since 1 January 2011. The Kurhaus building is held separately. The state owns the casino.

The operating record has the same 1872 hole as the others. What lifts the score is that Baden-Baden claims less and keeps more: a purpose-built house from 1824 and rooms from the 1850s, still in use for the thing they were built for.

The youngest entry, the best documented, and the only one whose headline date we could not fault. Estoril says 1931 and 1931 is when it opened. That is rarer in this business than it sounds.

Three dates, three different things. The first stone went down in 1916, laid for the founder Fausto de Figueiredo. The casino opened on 15 August 1931 to a design by Raoul Jourde. The building you walk into opened on 28 March 1968, an extension by Filipe Nobre de Figueiredo with José Segurado, structure by Manuel Agostinho Duarte Gaspar, and the interiors by Daciano da Costa and José Espinho, two of the significant Portuguese designers of the century. It is a modernist building and it does not pretend otherwise.

The ownership surprises people. Estoril Sol SGPS is controlled by the Ho family of Macau: Finansol holds 57.8 per cent and is a subsidiary of STDM, which controls SJM Resorts, and the chair is Pansy Ho. Amorim Turismo is the minority holder at 32.7 per cent. Amorim separately holds the Figueira da Foz concession, which is a different venue and a common mix-up. The Estoril gaming zone concession, which includes Casino Lisboa, runs to 31 December 2037; the signing date is reported two different ways so we give only the expiry.

The Bond story, which we cannot give you

Here is what is solid: neutral Portugal made Estoril a junction for spies and exiled monarchs, Duško Popov was here from 29 June to 10 August 1941, and he met Ian Fleming. Everything after that is quicksand. Fleming himself, shortly before he died, told the BBC that the idea came from a game he played against Germans, and did not mention Popov. His biographer John Pearson called Fleming's version a complete fabrication in 1966. The famous baccarat scene against "Bloch" for thirty-eight to forty thousand dollars comes from Popov's own memoirs and was popularised by Larry Loftis in 2016; Country Life puts it plainly as rumoured although unproven. A story that rests on the memoirs of the man it flatters, with no contemporary document behind it, is a story we are not going to sell you as history. Casino Royale was not filmed here either. That was the Czech Republic, in 2006.

A modest claim that holds. The mark is not a ten because nobody, including the operator, publishes whether the tables ran without interruption across those ninety-five years, and we will not fill that in for them.