Nature Hotels

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …

There are wildlife encounters, and then there's watching a family of wild elephants amble straight through a hotel reception on their way to raid a mango tree. At Mfuwe Lodge, in Zambia's South Luangwa National Park, this isn't a staged photo opportunity or a rare fluke. It's an annual event …

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 …

Dundgovi Province in southern Mongolia is not on most people's radar, which is precisely the point. The Gobi Desert here is vast, dry, and almost completely silent - a semi-arid steppe that nomads have traditionally called the "Steppe to Get Lost." Gobi Caravanserai sits in the middle of it, next …

There are plenty of hotels that claim to put you in touch with a place's culture. Hotel Qvevrebi in eastern Georgia takes the idea more literally than most: it has built 20 cottages shaped like the qvevri, the ancient egg-shaped clay vessels that Georgians have used to ferment and store …

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 …

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 …

Most resorts want you to stay on property. Hana-Maui Resort wants you to stay in a different way entirely - unhurried, untethered, and largely offline. Rooms here have no televisions, no alarm clocks, and in some cases no radios. The spa uses heated lava rocks and Hawaiian healing traditions that …

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 …