Nature Hotels

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 …

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 …

Somewhere between Malmedy and the Hautes Fagnes nature reserve, hidden inside a forest in the Belgian Ardennes, there is a neon sign on a building facade that reads: We Love You. It is the first thing you see when you arrive at Daft Hotel, and it sets the tone for …

There are around 4,000 certified campgrounds within a reasonable distance of Zion National Park. Most offer a flat patch of gravel, a fire ring, and a shower block that smells like everyone else's shampoo. Zion White Bison Resort, sitting just outside the park boundary in Virgin, Utah, offers something unique: …

Forget the beach. Forget the palm trees and the infinity pool overlooking a postcard sea. Whiteface Lodge pulls off something rarer: a resort that makes wilderness feel like the obvious choice. Tucked into New York's High Peaks region inside six million acres of Adirondack Park, it sits on the edge …

At The Mohicans Treehouse Resort in rural Ohio, a vintage Airstream hangs 7.5 meters (25 feet) in the air, Pete Nelson-designed cabins perch among century-old pines, and the entire place was built largely by Amish craftsmen using reclaimed barn wood. Deep in the forested hills of Knox County, an hour …

Picture this: you're sitting next to an open fire, a glass of Kyushu barley shochu in hand, watching the lights of Fukuoka glitter across a valley below. Behind you is your room - and depending on which type you booked, it might be a cave-like villa, a hillside cottage with …

The walls at Sacred Sands are packed with straw. Not metaphorically - straw bale construction means compacted bales stacked, framed, and finished in terracotta clay, resulting in walls so thick they function as their own acoustic system, insulation layer, and fire barrier all at once. It is an uncommon way …

You're watching pelicans glide in formation over the Pacific, listening to a conversation at the long communal table spiral from Mexican food politics to astrology, nursing something cold from the bar - and you haven't looked at your phone in three hours. The Wi-Fi password is "disconnecttoreconnect" for a reason. …

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's a secret door built into a hillside in Kenya. Step through it, walk a short tunnel, and you emerge to one of the most disorienting views in East Africa: a vast, golden sweep of Maasai Mara plains stretching 2,000 feet (610 meters) below you, lit by shafts of afternoon …

There are 26 pyramid-shaped villas arranged around a thermal lake in Fort Myers, Florida. The water bubbling up from 30 meters below the surface smells faintly of sulfur, changes color with the seasons, and is loaded with magnesium, potassium, calcium, and selenium. And yes, people keep coming back. Pyramids in …

There is a small wooden cabin perched on the edge of the forest on Mount Fløyen, above the rooftops of Bergen, Norway, and it will cost you absolutely nothing to spend the night in it. The catch? You have to have a child under 12, you can only stay once …

There are places that photographs simply cannot do justice to, and Emerald Lake in British Columbia’s Yoho National Park is one of them. The water shifts between seafoam green, bright teal, and a blue so vivid it looks edited – and then the light changes, and it starts all over …

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 …

Wake to manta rays gliding through turquoise water 150 meters below your bamboo bed. This is glamping at its most audacious – a sustainable bungalow perched on Nusa Penida's dramatic eastern cliffs, where you can shower with ocean views, lounge in a net suspended over the void, and watch nature's …

Spain's 98th parador took nearly two decades to build, rising from the ruins of an environmental catastrophe to become something genuinely special. Perched above a white sand beach on the Costa da Morte – the "Coast of Death," named for its countless shipwrecks – this glass and zinc structure disappears …

Sitting on a hillside above one of the world's smallest capitals, Hotel Føroyar doesn't just offer views of Tórshavn – it practically is the view. This is where international football teams crash after matches, where visiting musicians decompress, and where you can walk barefoot through rain and drizzle to reach …

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. …

Imagine an island where 50,000 pieces of bamboo were woven into villas perched among granite boulders, where dolphins occasionally drift past at breakfast, and where the biggest decision you'll face is whether to watch the sunrise or sunset from your private plunge pool. This is Cempedak, a 17-hectare Indonesian hideaway …