The measure of a truly remarkable holiday is so often its adjacency to a beach. The meeting of land and sea remains one of nature’s most aesthetically and spiritually rewarding gestures, and it is the one luxury no architect can add. The world’s finest beaches do not belong only to the overhyped, overshared, and overphotographed destinations. A new generation of hotels is quietly claiming coastlines the well-travelled have never thought to seek out. Here, we present six of the finest beach hotels found in the most unlikely of places, the essence of intrepid travel.
Rosewood Miyakojima, Okinawa, Japan
Japan has never really been a beach destination, until now. Rosewood’s March 2025 debut occupies a secluded peninsula on Miyakojima, wrapped in white sand and lapped by water in the improbable blue that has earned the surrounding sea its own name: Miyako blue. The island’s seven-kilometre Yonaha Maehama, a short drive south, is routinely ranked the third finest beach in the country, yet remains blissfully unknown beyond Japan’s own borders. Studio Piet Boon’s villas practise a kind of quiet architecture, all Ryukyu limestone and low profiles, deferring entirely to the coastline they frame. The result marries the precision and grace of Japanese hospitality with the barefoot ease of a proper beach holiday, two pleasures rarely found in the same postcode, but both worth discovering.
Nujuma, Ritz-Carlton Reserve, The Red Sea, Saudi Arabia
It’s unlikely Saudi Arabia is on your beach shortlist yet, but when the time is right, you will want to consider it. It starts with a grand sense of arrival by seaplane or boat across water so clear the reefs read like a map beneath you, before landing at the Ummahat archipelago, where Foster + Partners has scattered a constellation of shell-shaped villas along the shore. Opened in May 2024 as the Middle East’s first Ritz- Carlton Reserve, Nujuma fronts a coastline that is fringed by reefs that are considered among the healthiest on the planet. Days are spent snorkelling above coral gardens, and nights belong to the starry skies, viewed via the telescope in your villa, trained on a desert sky untroubled by a single electric light. Genuinely undiscovered places are rare, and this is one of them.
Aman Sveti Stefan, Sveti Stefan, Montenegro
Few arrivals in Europe carry the drama of Sveti Stefan, a fortified fifteenth-century village moored just off Montenegro’s Adriatic coast, its terracotta rooftops and cobbled lanes reached by a single narrow causeway. After five years behind closed doors, Aman’s most storied address has finally reopened, with pink-pebble beaches, the emerald lagoon of Queen’s Beach that’s reserved for guests alone, and the rare pleasure of sleeping inside ancient stone walls as old as time. On the mainland, Villa Miločer, once a royal summer residence, keeps its own quieter counsel amid gardens that run to the shore. The Adriatic has grown crowded elsewhere, but here, it remains gloriously calm.
Miavana by Time + Tide, Nosy Ankao, Madagascar
There is no road to Miavana, no jetty, no ferry timetable. There is only the helicopter, tracing Madagascar’s northeastern coast past baobabs and the hulls of long- abandoned ships, before setting down on a private isle that most atlases barely acknowledge. Fourteen villas front a ribbon of white sand, and the days assemble themselves around reefs that remain gloriously alive, lagoons empty enough to kiteboard without another soul in sight, and forest walks tracking crowned lemurs returned to the island through Time + Tide’s rewilding work. Every stay directly underwrites that conservation effort, lending the whole experience a rare sense of purpose. Anyone nostalgic for the Indian Ocean as it existed before it became a glossy holiday brochure will find it here.
Cheval Blanc Seychelles, Anse Intendance, Mahé
The Seychelles of the postcards has always drawn the crowds north; the discerning now head south. Anse Intendance, the silvery southwestern sweep long counted among the world’s most beautiful beaches, has exactly one resort upon it. Opened in December 2024, Cheval Blanc Seychelles unfolds across a jungled hillside and shorefront in villas conceived by Jean-Michel Gathy, the architect behind several of hospitality’s most quietly coveted addresses. The Spa Cheval Blanc by Guerlain sits folded into the hillside garden, its treatments scented with a jasmine created for the maison alone, and two Michelin Keys arrived almost immediately. For those who thought they had done the Seychelles, this new destination demands a revisit.
Four Seasons Resort Costa Rica Peninsula Papagayo, Guanacaste, Costa Rica
Cloud forests and surf breaks built Costa Rica’s reputation, which is why so few travellers think of it for a polished beach holiday. Peninsula Papagayo makes the case beautifully. The resort occupies a slender isthmus with twin curved beaches facing opposite directions, an accident of geography that gifts guests both sunrise and sunset over the water without ever leaving the property. Howler monkeys move through the canopy of rare dry tropical forest above, while an Arnold Palmer golf course tumbles towards a working marina below. Wild and civilised in equal, carefully judged measure, it has become the Pacific coast’s benchmark for luxury, welcoming children without ever feeling like a family resort.
