Mexico's beach wars3/19/2024 The hotel is owned by an Italian mother and daughter, Greta and Francesca Golinelli, whom we never saw but who clearly understand what makes a great hotel. What stood before us was a flame-lit garden, a free-form swimming pool, a palm-fringed beach and a little huddle of curvaceous, brightly painted palapa-roofed houses, all 10 times lovelier than I had dared imagine. Casa Las Tortugas bore scant resemblance to its nice-enough website. Tour operators and guidebooks have mostly yet to discover Holbox, so I trusted TripAdvisor, paying upfront for five nights at the island’s top-rated hotel, then fretting during the intervening weeks that I’d made a terrible mistake.Īs we climbed out of the buggy and passed through a portal illuminated by Moroccan lanterns, however, my anxious frown turned into a grin. But the downside of notionally “undiscovered” places tends to be a shortage of promising hotels. A remote island in the Gulf of Mexico, part of the Yum Balam Flora and Fauna Protection Area, with a white coral-sand beach stretching 40km along its northern perimeter, it certainly sounded alluring. There are no roads on Holbox, only sandy lanes, so there are almost no cars just buggies and dune bikes.īy now I was beginning to wonder why I had longed for years to come here. Safely on the other side, a taxi driver with a golf cart was there to meet us for the final five-minute ride. There had been an 11-hour flight from London to Cancún two hours in a bumpy taxi to the scruffy port of Chiquila on the northern tip of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula then an hour’s wait on the quay for the ferry that would take us 13km across the water to Isla Holbox (pronounced “oll-bosh”). Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest - delivered directly to your inbox.īy the time we approached Casa Las Tortugas, we had been travelling almost 20 hours.
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