Playa Viva - Sleep in a Treehouse, Release Baby Turtles, and Eat From the Farm

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.

This is a resort that has released over 450,000 baby sea turtles since 2010. It runs entirely off the grid on solar power. It holds a B-Corp score of 110, the highest any hotel in the world has ever received. Its treehouses are suspended in palm trees, designed to echo the Mobula rays that leap from the ocean out front. None of this is marketing copy slapped onto an ordinary beach hotel - it's the actual shape of the place.

Playa Viva sits on 200 acres of Mexico's Pacific Coast in the state of Guerrero, roughly 35 minutes south of Zihuatanejo International Airport. With just 20 rooms and a mile of private beach, it operates more like a thoughtfully run small community than a resort. You eat together, do yoga together in the mornings, cheer baby turtles into the ocean together. It has the particular warmth of a place where people keep coming back - and based on the guest stories swapped at dinner, many of them do.

Getting There and Where You Are

The airport at Zihuatanejo (ZIH) is served by over 50 direct flights per week - about half from Mexico City, the rest from major North American hubs. From the airport, a 35-minute drive brings you down the coast to the town of Juluchuca, population around 550, and through a plant-lined entrance tunnel that the resort describes as the threshold between your normal life and this one. For stays of three nights or more, round-trip airport transfers are included.

The surrounding geography is striking. The property is pressed between the Pacific Ocean and the Sierra Madre Mountains, and the land itself holds an estuary, a coastal forest, mangrove ecosystems, and an Aztec archaeological site. The nearest town of any real size is Petatlan, about 10 minutes and 25,000 residents away.

Guerrero state has historically been one of Mexico's top coconut producers, which meant decades of slash-and-burn agriculture that stripped native plants and disrupted the local watershed. Playa Viva bought land that bore the marks of this history and has spent 15 years working to reverse it - restoring native biodiversity, building a permaculture farm, and bringing locals into the process at every stage.

How a Coconut Farm Became a Conservation Project

Playa Viva opened in 2009, founded by David Leventhal, who also went on to found Regenerative Travel, a network of hotels committed to going beyond sustainability into active environmental restoration. The team - many of whom are from the local area - has helped reestablish native plant species critical to the watershed. They built and continue to manage a 20-acre permaculture farm.

They founded La Tortuga Viva (LTV) in 2010, a turtle conservation sanctuary staffed by an all-volunteer crew from the village of Juluchuca. The resort's solar panels and solar water heaters keep it 100% off-grid. The bamboo used to build the treehouses was partly grown on-site and partly sustainably sourced from abroad.

In January 2023, Playa Viva received its B-Corp score of 110 - a number that reflects not just environmental performance but community investment, governance, and worker welfare. The resort contributes 2% of every stay directly into its ReSiMar watershed regeneration initiative, covering conservation, community education, and restoration work. A further 10% gratuity is distributed across the full team.

The coconut shells your barman lobs off go into the compost; the compost feeds the farm; the farm feeds the kitchen; the kitchen scraps go to the pigs and chickens; the animals help regenerate the soil. The loop closes itself, and 15 years of operation means the team knows exactly how much food to prepare for any given group of guests.

The Food

Meals at Playa Viva are served three times a day, included in your stay, and built around a farm-to-table philosophy that actually means something here. The kitchen team has direct relationships with the producers of most items on your plate - some grown in the resort's own 20-acre permaculture garden, others sourced from local farming partners who supply milk, cheese, fruit, beans, corn, and eggs.

The food itself is what the kitchen calls "healthy Mexican" - traditional dishes prepared with minimal oil and as many organic and local ingredients as possible. Breakfast might bring chia seeds in coconut milk, fresh papaya and starfruit, made-to-order eggs, and gluten-free banana-oat bread. Lunch leans into sopes, ceviche, pozole, freshly caught seafood, and roasted vegetables, with a farm salad bar on the side. Dinner tends toward tortilla soup, Caesar salad, fresh red snapper or slow-roasted pork, followed by a dessert spread of chocolate tamales, coconut ice cream, and mango flan.

Snacks appear through the day - guacamole, fresh fruit popsicles called paletas, organic popcorn, or jicama with lemon, salt, and chile. Coffee is locally grown and organic; the flavored waters and medicinal teas made from on-site herbs like mint, lime, and cinnamon flow all day at no charge.

The Rooms

All 20 rooms at Playa Viva face the ocean. There are no televisions, no in-room Wi-Fi, no mini-bars, and - with one recent exception - no air conditioning. What the rooms do have is design: the bamboo treehouses won awards; the casitas open fully to the breeze; the Tower Suite has a copper outdoor bathtub for stargazing. The idea is that the hum of the ocean replaces everything a screen might otherwise provide.

Rooms divide broadly into three categories: Eco Casitas (ground-level or single-story casitas with full ocean views and shuttered or sliding doors), Treehouses (suspended in palm trees in several configurations), and the more unusual options like the Tower Suite and the new Infinity Casita.

King EcoCasita

The King EcoCasitas are self-contained single-story casitas with shutter doors that open to a full unobstructed ocean view or close for complete privacy. Each comes with a king bed that separates into two singles, plus two single daybeds that double as couches during the day. The private bathroom is on the same level.

Original Jet Treehouse

This is where it started. Launched in 2016, the Original Jet Treehouse is raised six feet off the ground on living palm trees and shaped like a cone - that profile, distinctive against the palms, made it an immediate word-of-mouth phenomenon.

The main perch holds a king bed (which splits into two singles) with an unobstructed ocean view and a small lounge area with an in-floor hammock. The private bathroom is in a separate bathhouse, down a set of stairs from the perch, and includes an additional daybed.

There are no true doors or windows - the sounds of the ocean, the birds, and the bugs are constant companions, which is either the whole point or something to weigh carefully depending on your relationship with silence.

New Jet Treehouse

The New Jet preserves the cone shape that made the original famous but adds a more developed back house. The perch still holds a king bed, and a hammock now extends out over the front of the room rather than sitting inside it.

The updated back house has a private bathroom downstairs and a proper lounge-bedroom upstairs, fitted with two daybeds and a desk with a view that guests tend to describe in superlatives. It's a more complete two-building configuration than the original while keeping the same design DNA.

Dune Manta Treehouse

The Manta Ray treehouses were designed after Playa Viva's founder saw drone footage of a Mobula ray migration filmed directly in front of the resort. The shapes in that footage - the spread wings, the fluid movement - became the architectural language of an entire new treehouse village, built in 2021 by bamboo construction specialist Jorg Stamm, who is also behind the renowned Green School in Bali.

The Dune Manta sits in the second row of treehouses, up on the dune, which makes it easier to access than some of its neighbors. Like all the Manta Ray treehouses, it's made up of two buildings: the perch, with a king bed and a net hammock suspended out front in the air, and the back house, with a private bathroom downstairs and a loft upstairs outfitted with two daybeds and a desk.

The ocean view is good from both structures. The bamboo construction and palm-frond palapa roofing use materials either harvested on-site or sustainably sourced.

Infinity Casita

The Infinity Casita is a newer addition and notably the first air-conditioned accommodation at Playa Viva. The roofline curves in a way that echoes the Manta Ray treehouses but forms an infinity symbol, which gives the casita its name.

At 120 square meters, it's a substantial space. The enclosed bedroom has a king bed and unobstructed ocean views; the bathroom is open-air and sits on the same level. On the second floor, an outdoor living space holds two daybeds. The casita sleeps up to four, and the king bed can convert to two singles. For anyone who wants the Playa Viva experience but needs the option of cooled air at the end of a hot day, this is the room.

Tower Suite

The Tower Suite sits above the common area, which means the views are panoramic in a way that nothing else on the property quite matches. The main bedroom has a king bed; a living room with two daybeds-couches provides extra sleeping capacity; and a large deck offers a wide spread of beach and ocean.

But the detail that distinguishes this room from everything else at Playa Viva - and arguably from most hotels anywhere - is the copper outdoor bathtub on the second deck. It is the only bathtub on the property, and the logic of using it at night, under the Sierra Madre dark sky with no light pollution, requires little further elaboration.

Wellness

The pool sits near the common area, steps from the beach, and is where much of the daytime social life of the resort naturally gathers.

The bar is a short walk from the sand and operates on a tab system - drinks are recorded and settled at checkout. Alcoholic beverages, smoothies, soft drinks, and fresh coconuts are available at an additional cost beyond the included meals and non-alcoholic drinks.

Playa Viva keeps at least one masseuse on staff at all times, working out of beachside palapa huts open to the sound of the ocean. Treatments include standard massage as well as facials and specialty scrubs using locally harvested materials, though the specific menu varies by provider - it's worth asking what's available when you arrive.

The holistic hosts - the resort's wellness-concierge hybrid staff members who lead yoga, guide you around the property, and join you at meals - are also available for massage and spa treatments, typically in the window after morning yoga and before dinner.

Morning yoga happens seven days a week in the open-air yoga shalas overlooking the ocean. The sessions are designed to work for all levels - beginners through people with established practices - and are led by the holistic hosts. The main tortuga chalet, with its palm-frond palapa roof shaped like a turtle shell, is the primary yoga space.

Additional yoga sessions can be booked privately for couples or kids at an extra cost. Throughout the year, the resort hosts visiting international yoga teachers for week-long retreats, and groups regularly book buyouts for yoga retreats of their own.

A mile of private beach is the resort's backyard, and it's absolutely unspoiled. The coastline faces south and southwest, directly exposed to Southern Hemisphere swells, which means the surf from roughly March through September can be serious.

The main surf months are May through July. Playa Viva has a few longboards available for the beach break directly in front of the resort, but the break at La Barrita next door is considered expert territory. Better options for beginners and intermediates - at Barra de Potosi, Zihuatanejo Bay, Troncones, or La Saladita - and the resort's local surf guide, Chimi, can help match you to the right break and the right board for your level.

Non-surfers will find the beach good for swimming, boogie boarding, and long morning walks. Dolphins are a regular presence in the waves; whale sightings are common from late December through March; and the pelicans that fly in formation over the water have become something of an unofficial mascot of the Playa Viva experience.

Baby Turtle Release

Each year, thousands of Olive Ridley turtles and smaller numbers of endangered Green and Leatherback turtles come to the shores of Playa Viva to lay their eggs. La Tortuga Viva, the conservation sanctuary Playa Viva founded in 2010, has safely released more than 450,000 baby sea turtles since then. The operation is run by an all-volunteer team from Juluchuca.

The volunteers patrol the beach at night looking for nesting turtles and tracks, collect eggs carefully and transfer them to the protected incubation sanctuary, and check on the nests multiple times daily. Olive Ridley eggs take about 45 days to hatch. When hatchlings emerge - usually in the early morning - they are collected and brought to the waterline for release.

You can join both the night patrol and the morning turtle release. The process involves drawing a line in the sand parallel to the sea and using a coconut shell to gently guide hatchlings in pairs toward the water. It can take up to three minutes for a turtle to make it from the line to the foam at the water's edge.

Turtle nesting peaks during the rainy season between July and October, and with a 45-day gestation period, the most releases happen in October, November, and December. That said, the resort sees baby turtles year-round, and a chalkboard sign in the common area updates you each morning on whether a release is happening that day. When it reads "No tortugas today," there is a sad face drawn next to the words. When it reads otherwise, you should probably set an alarm.