An architect walked a stretch of empty Caribbean coast in the 1970s, drew a white hacienda on the sand, and gave the Riviera Maya its first luxury hotel. The coast filled in around it. Maroma stayed where it was.
The drive in still runs down a dirt road through the jungle, which is the last thing you expect this close to Cancun. Then the trees open and the beach arrives, a curve of white sand against water the colour of glass. Maroma sits on it, low and pale, built into the palms rather than over them. The airport is forty kilometres north. It feels much further.
Jose Luis Moreno found this beach when there was nothing here. The Mexican architect bought the headland in the 1970s and set out to build the first hotel on a coast that had none. He laid the white stucco house on the principles of Mayan sacred geometry, favouring rounded forms and careful alignments over straight walls. The original estate held thirty-six rooms. It opened before the rest of the Riviera Maya knew it was the Riviera Maya.
The founder
Orient Express Hotels, now Belmond, acquired Maroma in the early 2000s and kept Moreno's blueprint intact. The estate grew, thoughtfully, with suites and villas added among the gardens. Belmond now sits inside LVMH, and in 2023 the group closed the hotel for a full restoration. It reopened later that year with seventy-two rooms and suites, most of them facing the sea, several with private pools, and one given over entirely to wellness.
The redesign went to Tara Bernerd. The British designer worked with materials and textiles drawn from across Mexico, keeping the palette earthy and the rooms full of light. Nothing about it reads as imported. A guest suite feels like a private casita with an adults-only pool a few steps from the sand, the whole thing calibrated to the pace Moreno intended half a century ago.
Maroma, A Belmond Hotel, Riviera Maya — Courtesy of Belmond
The craft
Mexican hands are all over the place. For the restoration Belmond commissioned the master ceramicist Jose Noe Suro to make more than seven hundred thousand tiles, each one shaped and glazed by hand, laid through the corridors and courtyards as a running tribute to the country's craft. The stone, the wood, the woven textiles all carry the same intent. This is a hotel that wants you to know where you are.
The spa is Guerlain's first in Latin America, a temple-cool room built for the island's own rituals. Native Melipona bees, the stingless species the Maya kept for centuries, live in a hive on the grounds, and their honey runs through the treatments; the bee even sits inside the hotel's logo. A local shaman leads a temazcal ceremony in a beachside sweat lodge, ninety minutes of herbal steam and chant. An apothecary lets guests blend their own infused salts from shelves of herbs.
The rest of the coast caught up to Maroma. It never once tried to catch up to the coast.
The Splendid EditThe table
There are four ways to eat. Casa Mayor runs Mexican classics from breakfast to dinner under chef Daniel Camacho, with the sustainably caught local fish marked out on the menu. Freddy's is an eight-seat palapa planted on the beach, all ceviche and salt air. Woodend by Curtis Stone is the signature room, the Australian chef cooking over open fire with island produce. Bambuco pours the agave: mezcal, tequila and the harder-to-find bottles, late into the evening.
The recognition has followed. Maroma holds two Michelin Keys, and the World's 50 Best Hotels named it number thirty-three in 2025, the highest-ranked hotel in Mexico. The lists change every year. The beach does not. Butlers still meet arrivals with a honey margarita and a copal cleansing, the smoke drawn through the air before you step inside.
To arrive at Maroma is to land on the version of this coast that came before all the others. The jungle closes behind the car, the beach opens ahead, and the hotel holds its ground in the middle, exactly as it has since one architect decided a stretch of empty sand was worth building on.
Maroma, A Belmond Hotel, Riviera Maya sits on Maroma Beach in Quintana Roo, Mexico, and reopened in 2023 following a full restoration. Details at belmond.com.
Photography courtesy of Belmond — © Belmond, Maroma, A Belmond Hotel, Riviera Maya