Every trip ends with a climb along the dunes, where you might catch some of the most mesmerizing sunsets of your life-the ocean-like sands constantly shifting as the winds carve waves into their surface impermanent but, just for a moment, perfectly wrought. You can just as easily spend a day hopping over the dunes on a fat bike or lingering on the premises, perhaps being immersed in a sound bath. But the most intriguing aspect is that activity and idleness are in equal supply here.
Sienna-walled guest rooms are kitted out with wooden chests and plush-patterned rugs that offer tactile warmth in a desolate place. Inside, the details give just enough of a sense of place-Moroccan-style lanterns and intricate mashrabiya screens, and even the odd Bedouin artifact, such as a dagger or a brass coffeepot-which feels purposeful rather than hokey. Date palms shade its formidable perimeter, while small canals modeled on ancient Arabian falaj irrigation systems carry cooling water between courtyards. The fortlike compound, with its crenellated walls, faux watchtowers, and horseshoe arches, emerges at the end of a slick ribbon of tarmac that snakes through dunes the color of Earl Grey tea. But the main takeaway of Grootbos is that just stopping and looking-at the interconnectedness and mad beauty of life-is the most mesmerizing thing of all.ĭeep within Abu Dhabi’s remote Empty Quarter, Qasr Al Sarab materializes from the sands like a fever dream. Most of the food on the carbon-negative reserve is grown on site, and nothing comes from more than 30 miles away, with many of the staff graduates of the in-house hospitality academy. You can ride horses across the sands, past ancient sea caves go on flower safaris, tree-planting expeditions, and whale-watching flights to see the calving Southern right whales that migrate inshore between July and December. The lodges are glassy and contemporary, but there’s a constant call outdoors-from the outside showers to tracking elusive aardvark and Cape leopard, or having lantern-lit dinners in a 1,000-year-old milkwood forest, all fairy-tale tangles.
With 889 plant species, seven of which are newly discovered, it is first and foremost a rare botanical treasure trove, in which owner Michael Lutzeyer has employed some of the Cape’s leading botanists and entomologists. This 6,177-acre private reserve is about treasuring the smaller, finer things. Grootbos, on the fynbos slopes near Walker Bay, south of Cape Town, is different. David Moralejoįor a long time, lodges in South Africa tended to be geared toward the Big Five. For all that it is woven into Marrakech like the knots in a Berber rug, La Mamounia has never, ever been boring. There’s a reason that the actors and rock stars have kept coming the fashionistas with kaftans and cigarettes.
There are all the columns, foliage-filled courtyards, and mosaics of the most photogenic medina riad-except that there’s also the smoky Churchill speakeasy, an Asian-focused Jean-Georges Vongerichten restaurant with its sultry blacks and reds, and that legendary, vast square pool, around which I find the people-watching irresistible (bring dark sunglasses).
#My sunny resort gra series#
La Mamounia was always a curious mash-up of Art Deco, Berber, and opulent Moorish, and the old place has had numerous facelifts over almost 100 years-from Jacques Majorelle’s bright stylings in 1946 to a theatrical noughties revamp by Jacques Garcia (Hotel Costes) and most recently a series of sly additions by Parisian futurists Jouin Manku, including a new cinema and teahouse. Upon seeing La Mamounia’s faded pink walls, Churchill was wont to ditch the suit and pick up his watercolor brushes Paul McCartney wrote “Mamunia” (meaning “safe haven” in Arabic) during a 1973 stay and Hitchcock, who filmed The Man Who Knew Too Much here, got his inspiration for The Birds from some overzealous finches on a jardin-facing balcony. There’s a very particular effect exerted by La Mamounia, which seems to take hold the moment you head up the green tiled steps to this most bohemian of grandes dames.
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