Hotels

On the inland slopes above Lanzarote's south coast, in the small village of La Asomada, a farmhouse that once belonged to the family of artist César Manrique has become one of the island's more interesting places to stay. Hotel César Lanzarote opened in 2023 with just 20 rooms, a restored …

In September 1958, Queen Juliana swung a silver axe to launch a ship built as the flagship of Holland America Line's transatlantic fleet: a 228-meter (748-foot) liner with an engineering choice that startled shipbuilders at the time – twin exhaust uptakes in place of a single funnel, which freed up …

For 114 years, the only way through these doors was as a member – and only if you were male, wealthy, and vouched for by someone already inside. Today anyone can walk into the Chicago Athletic Association, order a drink in a room where Prohibition-era police once looked the other …

On a hill overlooking downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan, sits an actual castle – turrets, sandstone walls, stained glass and all. It was built in 1895 by a local uniform manufacturer as a family home, and today it operates as a bed and breakfast run by a French-trained chef who describes himself …

On a low stretch of coral sand off the eastern coast of Taha'a, five wooden bungalows sit at the edge of a reef, running on solar power and drawing their own water and electricity from the island beneath them. Eden Taha'a occupies a private motu of 5,000 square meters (about …

Only two hotels sit close enough to hear Iguassu Falls roar: a Sheraton on the Argentine side, and Hotel das Cataratas on the Brazilian side, inside the boundaries of Iguaçu National Park. Day-trippers file out at dusk, but you get to stay - watching 275 waterfalls catch the last light, …

A couple of hours by boat from Greenland's capital, past waterfalls and drifting icebergs, sits a small cluster of heated tents where the only sounds at night are ice cracking in the water and wind against canvas. There's no phone signal, no wifi, and – depending on the season – …

A wheat mill built to feed a medieval garrison, a wedding gift that became a haven for three generations of painters and filmmakers, and a manuscript with no letter E written entirely under its roof. Few properties on the Seine carry this much accumulated history, and fewer still are still …

Lie in the bathtub at this Shanghai hotel and you can watch a plane take off. Not a distant view of a plane, half-glimpsed between buildings, but the whole show: taxiing, throttling up, lifting off, disappearing into the haze over the Yangtze Delta. The Hilton Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport, which …

Icebergs the size of buses break off an ice cap in southeast Iceland, drift across a lagoon, wash out to sea, and land back on a black sand beach as scattered blocks of ice. Hótel Jökulsárlón - Glacier Lagoon Hotel, which opened in 2024, sits a short drive from that …

Most hotels don't come with a backstory involving 14,000-tonne concrete silos and a decommissioned grain terminal, but Puerto Norte Design Hotel does. The building started life as part of Rosario's old port infrastructure before being reworked into a six-floor hotel that still wears its industrial bones on the outside. Every …

A single photograph did it: covered wagons parked against blood-red cliffs, looking more like a Western film set than a working hotel. It turns out the wagons are real, they're bookable, and they sit a mile from the entrance to one of Utah's quietest national parks - one so overshadowed …

Banksy calls it a three-story cure for fanaticism, though on arrival what you actually notice first is how close the wall is – close enough that most rooms get barely 25 minutes of direct sunlight a day. The Walled Off Hotel, part functioning hotel, part gallery, part museum, and part …

Check in at Anybody and nobody hands you a room key. What you get instead is a PIN code and a tablet with a single button on it. Press it, and the room takes over from there: the lights shift, a story starts playing through hidden speakers, and for the …

At Hotel Icefiord in Ilulissat, Greenland, the staff keep a chalkboard in the restaurant where they mark a line for every whale spotted from the terrace each month. Some months it fills up fast. It's a bit of a running joke among them, but it also sums up the whole …

A former Russian consulate on a Hokkaido hillside is an unlikely setting for a Relais & Châteaux address. Hotel Biaclyn Hakodate has taken a 1908 diplomatic outpost - the only surviving building of its kind in Japan - paired it with a newly built wellness wing, and turned the whole …

Some hotels put you to bed inside a cave and call it a gimmick. Anemoessa Guesthouse, in the hills above the Corinthian Gulf, does something slightly stranger: it treats the cave as the point, then adds a wood fire and a balcony looking out over water and mountains, and lets …

A stretch of southwestern Bulgaria has two castle-shaped hotels rising out of the landscape between two villages, visible from far enough away that drivers on the road to Leshten tend to do a double-take. Neither building is old. Both are heated and filled by water that comes out of the …

Picture a hotel in the Dolomites where the roof has a ski slope, a trampoline park, and a pickleball court, and the swimming pool below empties straight into a natural lake with its own sandy beach. It sounds like something dreamed up for a theme park brochure, but the Falkensteiner …

Pilots flying into Nuremberg Airport use it to find their way home. That's not a marketing flourish - the sloped glass facade of a pyramid-shaped hotel outside Fürth genuinely functions as a landmark on approach, its faceted surface catching the light from miles off. After sitting empty since 2022, the …