Hotels

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 …

Drivers along the Great Ocean Road have been slamming on their brakes for this one for decades. Kids in back seats compete to spot it first, and for a stretch of coastline that already has plenty to look at, one small glass box balanced on a single concrete leg somehow …

You can fly across most of Western Australia and see barely a soul below – just red earth, then blue water, then more red earth. Sal Salis sits right where those two extremes collide: a scattering of safari tents dropped between a national park full of gorges and kangaroos, and …

After a long day scrambling over red rock, the appeal of a place like the Broken Spur Inn & Steakhouse becomes obvious fast. It sits on a hilltop just outside Torrey, Utah, close enough to Capitol Reef National Park that you can be back at the entrance in five minutes, …

A building that once controlled every second of a person's day now holds a quiet you're free to sit in as long as you like. After a century of guarded silence, Nara Prison has reopened, ready to ask you what freedom really means. At HOSHINOYA Nara Prison, that quiet hasn't …

In Chiba Prefecture, a 130-year-old school that closed its doors in 2014 has been reborn as one of Japan's most unusual places to spend the night - classrooms, blackboards, and all. Japan has a surplus of empty schools. Decades of demographic decline have left hundreds of perfectly solid buildings standing …