Most popular unique hotels - Page 86.

High in Portugal's Serra da Estrela, an orange-hued fortress sprawls across the mountainside like something out of a Wes Anderson film. This is no ordinary hotel. For decades, tuberculosis patients took the air on its curative balconies. Then it sat abandoned for 40 years, briefly housing refugees from Portugal's colonial …

There are no light switches at Feynan Ecolodge. No minibar, no television, no electricity sockets in the rooms. What you get instead is candlelight flickering off stone walls, a sky so dense with stars it feels structural, and the sound of nothing in particular. Located deep inside Jordan's Dana Biosphere …

Langkawi has no shortage of places to stay. There are clifftop resorts with infinity pools, beachfront villas with butler service, and boutique guesthouses tucked into the jungle. None of them look like a coconut. On the eastern edge of the island, in a sheltered cape called Tanjung Rhu where mangrove …

Imagine sipping a gin and tonic by the pool when a herd of elephants ambles up to drink from it. This is the reality at Somalisa Camp, tucked into a private corner of Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park, where the line between luxury and wilderness blurs in the most spectacular way. …

Deep in Finnish Lapland, roughly 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Kittilä airport, there's a place that traces its roots to the Stone Age. Ancient trap pits and hearths have been unearthed on the land around Nivunki Village, a reminder that humans have been drawn to this remote stretch of Arctic …

There's a version of "eco resort" that means a few solar panels and a sign about towel reuse. Ulaman is not that. This is a place where the walls are literally compressed earth, the staircases are woven bamboo, and there's a hand-carved wine cave hidden behind a stone wall that …

Somewhere in western Belize, a waterfall is tumbling into a turquoise pool that almost nobody sees. It isn't on a popular trail or a backpacker's bucket list. It's just sitting there, doing its thing, above the jungle canopy of the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, which stretches across 107,000 acres …

There are places that make you question why you ever settled for ordinary vacations, and Capella Lodge on Lord Howe Island is one of them. This nine-suite retreat sits at the foot of two volcanic peaks that tower over the world's southernmost coral reef, on an island so pristine that …

You can hear them before you can see them. Somewhere past the darkened tree line, beyond the torchlit pathways and the hush of a zoo without crowds, a lion roars. Then another. The sound is visceral and close enough to make your chest tighten - and when you realize the …

There's a moment, sometime between your first glass of Pessac-Léognan and your third hour of doing absolutely nothing by an indoor pool, when Les Sources de Caudalie stops feeling like a hotel and starts feeling suspiciously like someone's very beautiful home that you've been allowed to borrow for a few …

Wolves in the woods, art by Kengo Kuma, and a lake you can actually swim in. Oasyhotel sits inside 1,000 hectares (2,471 acres) of protected Apennine wilderness in Tuscany - Italy's first WWF-affiliated nature reserve - and it is doing something uniquely different with the place. Somewhere between Florence and …

In the far southeastern corner of Utah, where the Colorado Plateau breaks apart into red rock and silence, a resort sits pressed against 60-meter (200-foot) sandstone cliffs as though it has always been there. Bluff Dwellings Resort & Spa is 10 buildings and 56 rooms stacked and weathered-looking against the …

The reception desk at ZERO Box Lodge in Coimbra is a motorbike. The check-in process involves a cold beer, handed to you on arrival, and the quiet suggestion that the best thing you can do now is go outside. The rooms are stripped back by design - no windows, no …

There are places you visit and places that visit you back. Aura House, a hand-shaped bamboo structure curling along the edge of Bali's Ayung River gorge, belongs firmly in the second category. It was designed by IBUKU, the architecture collective founded by Elora Hardy - daughter of Canadian jewelry entrepreneur …

On a wild stretch of Benguerra Island, where sand dunes roll into the Indian Ocean and dugongs graze offshore seagrass meadows, Kisawa Sanctuary has built something unusual: luxury villas incorporating 3D printing technology, staffed largely by locals, and driven by a commitment to marine science. The 300-hectare property sits on …

There are plenty of reasons to visit Norway in winter. But most of them involve heading north - to Tromsø, to Finnmark, to the kind of latitudes where the aurora borealis is practically a nightly obligation. What fewer people know is that some of Norway's most quietly extraordinary winter experiences …

Millions of people pour into Switzerland's Jungfrau region every year, and almost all of them stick to the same handful of villages and viewpoints. Berghotel Obersteinberg is not one of them. To get here you climb 850 vertical meters (2,790 feet) above Stechelberg on foot, since no road, cable car, …

At Shanghai Snow World Hotel, you can ski-in, ski-out, and still make your teppanyaki reservation by 7pm - no mountain required. The hotel sits inside a vast climate-controlled dome in Pudong, where the snow is real, the slopes are certified by Guinness World Records, and your room door opens directly …

There is a photograph taken of you on arrival and placed on your nightstand by the time you reach your suite. The card alongside it reads: "We are celebrating you." This tells you almost everything you need to know about La Residence. The hotel - part of the family-owned Royal …

Somewhere in the Charente countryside of southwest France, on a 1,000-hectare (2,500-acre) estate of forests, lakes, and open pastureland, there is a tennis court floating on a pond. There is also a 13th-century castle tower where you can sleep beneath a glass ceiling and look up at the stone ribs …