Nick Troubetzkoy, the architect and owner of Jade Mountain, spent years working on the design of a resort that would not obstruct the view it was built to frame. The solution he arrived at — remove the fourth wall entirely, turning each suite into a three-sided room open to the Pitons and the Caribbean — sounds simple in retrospect and was, by all accounts, genuinely difficult in execution. The structural engineering required to suspend a private infinity pool above a hillside while leaving one entire wall absent is not a problem that yields quickly.

The land Sugar Beach occupies was, for most of the nineteenth century, a sugar estate. The cane fields are gone; the stone ruins of the estate buildings remain, incorporated into the resort with the confidence of a design team that understood that history, properly framed, is more compelling than anything a landscaper could plant in its place. The ruins appear between the villas as you walk toward the beach — quiet reminders that the ground you are on has been doing something significant for considerably longer than you have been visiting it.

What makes Excellence Playa Mujeres singular is not the swim-out suites, though they are exceptional. It is not the eleven restaurants, though the tequila list at Agave & Sea deserves its own essay. What makes it singular is the ferry. The resort sits on Isla Mujeres — an island — which means the only way to arrive is by boat across a channel that takes approximately twenty minutes. Those twenty minutes accomplish something remarkable: they make the resort feel genuinely remote. The channel is a psychological border, not merely a geographical one.

Excellence Riviera Cancún was the first. It is where the brand discovered what a genuinely excellent adults-only all-inclusive could feel like when designers stopped compromising. The property sits directly on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef — the second largest coral reef system in the world — which means the snorkeling is not an amenity so much as a geographical inevitability. Pull on a mask, walk into the water, and the reef is there.

The name translates as “The Windows to Paradise,” which is either the most accurate hotel name in Mexico or the most audacious, depending on whether you have been. The suites open directly to the desert and the sea — every room a private terrace, most with their own plunge pool, several with telescopes positioned to catch the desert sky after the guests have finished watching the Pacific turn colors at dusk. Las Ventanas is a Rosewood property, which means the service standard is old-world formal delivered with a warmth that is specifically Mexican, and specifically Cabo.

The Waldorf Astoria Pedregal has a private tunnel. This fact tends to dominate the conversation when people describe the arrival experience, and understandably so — you enter through a mountain, not around it, and emerge on the other side to find the hotel perched on a cliff directly above the famous Arch of Cabo San Lucas, with the Pacific Ocean visible in every direction. The tunnel is approximately 500 feet long. The view at the other end makes the 500 feet feel like a reasonable trade. This is a property that understood, at the design stage, that arrival is part of the experience.

Esperanza means “hope,” which is either a philosophical choice or a geographical one — the resort sits on a bluff above the Sea of Cortez where the light in the morning arrives at an angle that has been described, by guests who are not given to hyperbole, as transformative. Auberge Resorts built Esperanza on the conviction that luxury and intimacy are not in tension. The property has 57 suites and residences. The staff outnumbers the guests. This ratio is not accidental.

Four Seasons operates two properties in Mexico that represent the brand at its most assured. Costa Palmas, on the East Cape of Baja, is newer — a private beach community where the hotel sits within a marina and nature reserve, facing the calm turquoise waters of the Sea of Cortez. This is the Baja that most visitors do not find, which is part of its value. Punta Mita, on the Pacific coast of the Riviera Nayarit north of Puerto Vallarta, is the Four Seasons at its most dramatic — a private peninsula with two Jack Nicklaus golf courses, private surf breaks, and an overwater palapa that holds the distinction of being one of the most photographed spaces in Mexican hospitality.

Grand Velas does not have rooms. It has suites. At both properties — Los Cabos on the Pacific, Riviera Maya on the Caribbean — the smallest accommodation is over 1,000 square feet. This is not a premium tier. This is what the brand considers a reasonable amount of space for a person on vacation to occupy. The philosophy is consistent across both coasts: butler service from arrival, all dining included without reservation requirements, spa access included, and a Grand Class tier that provides a private pool, dedicated beach, and the kind of concierge attention that learns your preferences faster than you can state them.

Las Ventanas al Paraíso — The Windows to Paradise — earned its name honestly. The resort sits at the southernmost tip of the Baja Peninsula where the Pacific Ocean meets the Sea of Cortez, a convergence that produces one of the most arresting landscapes in Mexico. The architecture is white adobe against red desert rock, the infinity pools face due west, and the telescope on every terrace is not a prop. The stars above Los Cabos are extraordinary. The resort was designed so you would look up.

The Waldorf Astoria Los Cabos Pedregal occupies a private peninsula that is, technically, inaccessible by conventional means. Guests arrive through a tunnel carved directly through the rock of the Sierra de la Laguna mountains, emerging on the other side into a resort that faces the Pacific and overlooks the famous stone Arch of Cabo San Lucas. This entrance is not theatrical coincidence. It is a deliberate signal that what lies beyond the mountain is a different world entirely, and the Waldorf intends to make that case from the first moment.

Esperanza means hope in Spanish, and the resort earned the name at its founding by the Auberge Resorts Collection with the conviction that a luxury property could sit in a desert landscape without trying to overcome it. The cacti were left in place. The natural rock formations were incorporated into the architecture. The color palette — terracotta, sand, the deep blue of the Sea of Cortez — was taken directly from the surrounding landscape and reflected back. The result is a resort that feels, unusually, like it belongs exactly where it was built.

The Pacific side of Los Cabos is dramatic — crashing surf, rugged cliffs, the kind of seascape that photographs beautifully and swims dangerously. The Four Seasons at Costa Palmas made a different choice. The resort faces the Sea of Cortez on the East Cape, where the water is calm, warm, and clear enough to see the bottom at fifteen feet. The beach is swimmable every day of the year. This is not a minor amenity in a destination that has spent decades selling an ocean its guests could not enter.

Punta Mita occupies a private peninsula at the northern tip of Banderas Bay, the largest bay on Mexico’s Pacific coast. The Four Seasons arrived here in 1999, before most of its neighbors, and the early decision to build on a private peninsula with a guarded perimeter has produced an atmosphere that remains, twenty-five years later, remarkably contained. The Marieta Islands — a protected national park where blue-footed boobies nest and humpback whales breach from December through March — are visible from the beach and accessible by the resort’s private boats in forty minutes.

Grand Velas does not have rooms. It has suites. Every single guest, regardless of what they paid or how long they are staying, is accommodated in a suite — the smallest of which is 1,012 square feet. This is not a premium tier. This is simply what the hotel considers a reasonable amount of space for a person on vacation to occupy. The butler service is correspondingly serious: a personal assistant, fluent in the language of anticipation, who will arrange anything the resort is capable of arranging.

The Grand Velas Riviera Maya is organized into three distinct Ambassadors — Grand Class, Zen, and Family — each with its own pools, restaurants, and atmosphere. Grand Class is adults-only, set in the jungle canopy, and centers on a private cenote pool cut into the natural limestone. Zen occupies the beachfront, all clean lines and Caribbean views. The architecture moves between jungle and ocean as if the resort could not decide which landscape was more extraordinary and resolved the problem by including both.

The Fluxa family began in shoes. In 1930, Lorenzo Fluxa founded a footwear company on the island of Mallorca that would grow, over the following decades, into one of Spain’s most successful manufacturing enterprises. The pivot to hospitality came in 1956, when the family opened their first hotel on the same island, with the same conviction that had served them in manufacturing: that quality, applied consistently and without compromise, produces results that competitors find difficult to explain and nearly impossible to replicate. The hotel was called Iberostar. The family still owns every property in the portfolio today.

Mallorca is where Iberostar learned what it wanted to be. The island is the most visited in Spain and has, as a result, a long history of tourism ranging from extraordinary to mediocre. The Iberostar properties on Mallorca — the Selection Playa de Muro, the Selection Albufera, the Santa Eulalia — have consistently occupied the extraordinary end of that spectrum, and the reason is the same as it has always been: the family owns the land, employs the staff, manages the kitchens, and is present in the decisions that determine whether a hotel is truly excellent or merely expensive.

Joia is a word from the Catalan language — the language of Mallorca — that means jewel. The Iberostar Selection Joia properties represent the company’s answer to a question the market had been asking for some time: what happens when a large hospitality group with sixty years of experience decides to apply everything it has learned to a single tier of properties and hold absolutely nothing back? The answer is the Joia collection, and the answer is good. The Joia Maya in the Riviera Maya is, by the assessment of nearly every serious hospitality publication that has reviewed it, among the finest adults-only all-inclusive properties in the Caribbean basin.

In 2017, Iberostar made a commitment that no major hotel chain had previously attempted at scale: to achieve zero single-use plastic across its entire portfolio by 2020, to eliminate single-use plastics from all supplier relationships, and to create a marine research programme at every coastal property. The Wave of Change programme, as it came to be known, was not a marketing campaign. It was a corporate restructuring. The plastic targets were met. The marine programme now employs over forty marine biologists across the Americas and the Mediterranean, each tasked with actively restoring the reef ecosystem at their property.