La Vida Local

A bright turquoise wooden door carved with the Mayan bee god Ah Mucen Kab, between two stone pillars and in front of a bee mosaic — The doors of the meliponarium are emblazoned with the Mayan bee god, Ah Mucen Kab.

Inside a chalk-white, seashell-shaped structure, I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of waves and the rise and fall of a man’s voice intoning a traditional Maya blessing. What he said was a mystery, but mine was not to question; mine was to relax, something the American obsession with productivity, and Northeastern sense of impatience, has made me exceedingly bad at.

I’d come to Chablé Yucatán, about 30 minutes outside Mérida in northeastern Mexico, for the ultimate test of my ability to let go. “The new luxury is space, nature, sustainability, and wellness,” Sales Director Oscar Quijano told me of the immersive resort. Chablé Yucatán’s commitment to personal wellness is impressive, but its efforts at environmental revitalization may be even more so. In the process of rehabilitating a historic hacienda, the team has also rebuilt a local ecosystem.

Graceful and ornate arch with wrought iron doors opening onto an expansive lawn, with a large building in the background — Several of the hacienda’s original entrance gates still stand at Chable Yucatan.

Blending in to stand out

The state of Yucatán was once the heartland of ancient Maya civilization (1000 BCE to 1521 CE). It seems an unlikely choice for a luxury resort, especially in Chocholá, a small western Yucatán municipality about three hours from Cancún, where one-quarter of the current 4,800 residents are of Indigenous descent and speak Yucatec Maya. The town is modest, with a small park, a barrel-vaulted cathedral, a few cheerfully painted restaurants and shops, and low-slung, whitewashed houses snugged behind stone walls. It’s the kind of place where you’re likely to see more bicycles than cars, and where dusty trails diverge off the main roads and into nowhere.

The path we turned down might as well have been a gateway to a parallel universe filled with chittering woodland creatures. Out the lush, leafy vegetation of the Maya Forest, which stretches across 35 million hectares in Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala, Chablé Yucatán materialized.

Two turquoise chairs on a wooden deck inside a stone walled patio, with an open patina green door in the background — The open door of the private patio invites you inside a VIP villa at Chable Yucatan.

The resort was built on the grounds of a colonial hacienda, 1,200 of which were established during the rope-making boom of the late 1800s, for growing henequen, a sprawling, fan-shaped relative of the sisal plant. As the production of synthetic fibers arose, the haciendas went belly-up. Most were abandoned by 1915.

Several have been transformed into museums. Others were rebuilt in their colonial image and opened as hotels. Jorge Borja of Grupo BV, the lead architect for Chablé Yucatán, told me, “These places are beautiful, but they’re not comfortable. We wanted it to be relaxing, but instead of restoring all of the hacienda, we wanted to have a remembrance of what it was.”

Among Chablé Yucatán’s 740 acres, original structures—even crumbling ones—have been integrated into the design. I got my first taste upon check-in, at a flat-roofed red stucco building, once the office where hacienda workers collected their weekly wages.

Orange ceramic dishes of fruit shaped marzipans on a brightly striped tablecloth with a teapot and miniature cups — La merienda, or afternoon snack, at Chable Yucatan changes every day. This day featured fruit-shaped marzipans and tezcalate, a Mayan cacao drink.

Up a cobbled walkway, I entered the one fully rebuilt structure on the property: Casa Principal, the resort’s central gathering space. The staff was setting up merienda, a late-afternoon snack. From a plate of colorful marzipans molded into miniature fruits and vegetables, I selected a bite-size watermelon slice. I carried it, along with a ceramic cup of tezcalate, a Mayan cacao drink, onto the tiled terrace. Through the grand arches, I looked out onto a lawn ringed with the remains of centuries-old stone walls, like a lost ruin just waiting to be rediscovered.

Beyond a timeworn arched gate, paved paths led to Chablé Yucatán’s 37 casitas and 4 villas, each separated by dense, junglelike growth. Their number markers bore a Mayan word, such as Kaan (origin) or Aj k’iin (the day).

A hotel suite containing tile floors, a bed dressed in white linens, and a neutral sofa with bright embroidered pillows — The interior of my casita. The track along the ceiling above the bed allows mosquito netting to be pulled around it, so you can sleep peacefully even in the wetter seasons.

Room with stone tile floors, king bed dressed in white linen, and louvred glass doors that look out onto a private pool, with a blue bicycle parked in the background — The interior of my casita. The track along the ceiling above the bed allows mosquito netting to be pulled around it, so you can sleep peacefully even in the wetter seasons.

Mine was the slightly less poetic Weech (armadillo), but the rustic-minimalist room, layered with textures in neutral colors, was soothing. I ran a hand over the embroidered linen decorative pillows. According to the resort’s interior designer, Paulina Moran, their patterns are contemporary interpretations of eighteenth-century colonial designs.

In the private plunge pool, I bobbed on the water, then lay back in the overwater hammock, allowing the water to evaporate off my skin while I listened to the swooping call-and-response of the melodious blackbird.

After a pre-dinner rinse under the waterfall head of the glass-walled moon shower, I dressed for dinner. Through the darkness, I was drawn by the lights of Ixi’im, the resort’s fine-dining restaurant, a stunning piece of architecture that integrates the hacienda’s ruined rope-making factory into its design.

A restaurant with a modern glassed dining area built into the side of a historic hacienda ruin lit up at night — The exquisite Ixi’im, Chable Yucatan’s fine dining restaurant, incorporates part of the original henequen factory of the hacienda into its design.

Past a bar crafted from salvaged machine parts, and through a glass-walled hallway displaying the world’s largest collection of tequila, I sat in the tiled dining room and sampled a menu that highlights traditional Mexican techniques and local ingredients, such as roasted cauliflower with a piquant Simojovel chile sauce, and a tostada of grilled grouper atop a crispy, heirloom corn shell.

Back at my room, I tugged the privacy rope across the driveway and made a mental note to rise early and give my loaner bike a whirl around the trails. I cracked the blinds and sank back against the bed’s leather headboard, letting the breeze-ruffled palm fronds hypnotize me into sleep.

Indigenous practices & sustainability

So lulled was I by my environs that I did not, in fact, wake early. I jogged off to a late breakfast at poolside casual-dining restaurant Ki’ol, where I piled my plate with wedges of fresh guava, pineapple, and papaya.

A tanned, smiling young man pulled up in a golf cart outside Chablé Yucatan’s iconic red arch. André Gaillard García, the resort’s veterinarian, beckoned for me to join him on the Green Route, a two-hour tour that highlights the resort’s flora and fauna, plus its Maya-inspired practices and sustainability measures.

These include replanting endemic trees, such as roble, whose delicate white flowers are an important source of pollen for bees, and palo mulato, or “tourist tree,” whose peeling, shiny red bark resembles the sunburnt skin of gringas like me. All are part of the effort to rebuild the local ecosystem and support biodiversity.

A round domed structure featuring an arched wooden door and a roof brightly painted with the likeness of Mayan goddess Ixchel — Ixchel, the Mayan goddess of birth and fertility, welcomes you in for a temazcal ceremony.

Deep within the forest, we stopped at a temazcal, a semicircular clay sweat lodge. As we entered through a wooden door, its overhang emblazoned with the brightly painted vulva of Ixchel, the Mayan goddess of birth and fertility, Gaillard explained that people have profound experiences within its walls. “I came out crying,” he told me. “It was like a rushing river of emotions. When I was done, I felt so light.”

We continued on to the ka’anches, traditional raised gardens whose beds overflowed with 55 varieties of vegetables and herbs, including lemony Mexican oregano and bracing hoja santa. Creeping vines along the ground birthed the squat green pumpkins so prevalent in Mayan cuisine. The gardens supply both restaurants, as well as Casita Maya, an outdoor kitchen where you can take a Mayan cooking class.

Leafy herbs growing in a raised bed made of bentwood — The ka’anches, or Mayan raised beds, at the resort grow much of the food and herbs used on its restaurant menus.

Close up of a hand holding an achiote pod, with the red and white seeds visible inside — The ka’anches, or Mayan raised beds, at the resort grow much of the food and herbs used on its restaurant menus.

Gaillard plucked a spiny annatto pod off a tree and squeezed it open, inviting me to squash its round red seeds between my fingers. For hours after, I caught a whiff of the peppery herb from my Lady Macbeth hands.

On the far western side of the property, we paused at the sanctuary for white-tailed deer, whose numbers have been decimated in the Yucatán by indiscriminate hunting. Across the road, through a turquoise gate carved with the figure of Ah-Mucen-Kab, the honey god of Maya mythology, a thatched-roof shed stood in a forest clearing. Its shelves were lined with rows of wooden shoeboxes etched with Mayan designs, and as we drew closer, I could hear them humming. Each housed a colony of Melipona beechii, an endangered stingless bee sacred to the ancient Maya.

A shoebox shaped wooden box carved with Mayan figures and designs topped with an oral syringe full of melipona honey — One of the beehive boxes at the meliponarium, which offer a safe haven for the sacred Melipona bee.

Gaillard opened a hive box and used a syringe to withdraw honey from a bubble within the miniature lunarlike landscape. He drizzled it onto the back of my hand. I licked it off. The honey was unlike any I’ve tasted: fresher and more liquid than the supermarket variety, with a mild sweetness and a pronounced floral flavor, courtesy of the replanted native blooms the bees feed on.

Wellness rooted in ancient tradition

While the sun was still ascending the morning sky, I hopped on my bike, luxuriating in the sensation of wind rushing against my skin, and the chattering of the Yucatán jay shaking off sleep. Emboldened, I picked up my pace, whizzing down hills and careening around corners. Atop a fence, I spotted a turquoise-browed motmot—a spectacular bird with a parrot-green back, rusty belly, and long, bright blue flight and tail feathers—and gawped. Turning forward again, I was startled by a maintenance bike and cart stationed near the edge of the path.

In truth, neither blocked my way. Also in truth, most 10-year-olds can pedal circles around me. I cut the handlebars too sharply, depositing myself in the dirt off the elevated path. Hauling up to my feet, I brushed the leaves off my T-shirt and glanced around. The ditch dive had gone unobserved, proving the age-old adage that if a writer falls off her bike in the woods and no one is there to witness it, it never really happened.

The resort property is full of places to unwind, contemplate and just be.

My visit to Chablé Yucatán’s spa could not have been better timed. The facility is composed of a main building and 14 private treatment rooms clustered around a cenote, or natural sinkhole. Mexico’s 3,000 cenotes, which the Maya believed were portals to the underworld and are connected by a network of underground rivers, formed 66 million years ago when an asteroid smashed into the earth, fracturing the Yucatán’s limestone bedrock and causing a “nuclear winter” that blotted out the sun and 75 percent of all life on earth.

According to Borja, the greenish granite of the spa mimics the cenote’s natural color and creates an infinity effect. It also does a respectable job of helping the large building blend in among the cenote’s vegetation.

A tiny woman with gleaming black hair escorted me to the seashell structure where I listened to the Mayan blessing. At a table laden with plants and incense, she used a smoldering bundle of herbs to invoke the four elements.

Beautiful jade pool surrounded by palm trees and the structure lit with string lights at night — The main pool of Chable Yucatan, with K’iol restaurant in the background, lit up at night.

I eased my body, achy from the bike tumble, into a saltwater flotation tank, and drifted, weightless, on my back for 30 minutes. Afterward, in a teak treatment room overlooking the cenote, I was sugar-scrubbed, bathed, and massaged into noodlelike submission. By the time I stood on the porch, nursing a mug of tea and watching fat raindrops ripple the water, I had begun to think there might be something to this whole peace-and-relaxation thing.

That evening as I settled in at Ki’ol, a baseball-capped man and his elegant partner were just getting up from their table. They walked hand in hand through a lit arch, the woman’s lustrous satin gown, the color of a ripe peach, fluttering behind her.

“That’s him!” stage-whispered one of the women at the table beside mine.

“Who?” I said back.

“He plays for the Cowboys,” she gushed.

I nodded, feigning interest in football, before turning back to a bowl of sikil pak, a piquant pumpkinseed dip, and a plate of hibiscus flower enchiladas topped with pickled onions and salsa verde. I couldn’t blame the celebrity couple for wanting to vacation in the middle of the Mayan Forest, where they were more likely to spot the elusive chablé, the resort’s namesake anteater, than be mobbed by fans.

Black plate holding sliced fish with tomatoes, cheese, and fish roe atop a crispy tostada, with a lime wedge on the side — Sashimi tostada at K’iol

Afterward, I made a lazy circuit around the property. The air was filled with the croaking courtship of insects and the scent of flowers gently folding their petals for the night. I spread my arms wide, as if conjuring the electric-green winking of fireflies on the lawn in front of the Cigar Bar. I’m not sure how long I stayed like that. My time at Chablé Yucatán had taught me that true restoration isn’t found in checking things off a list, but in surrendering to the simplicity of a place that had invited me to breathe, unwind, and simply be.