The 100 Best Places in Mexico

The entrance is a secret door, which is either thrilling or exhausting depending on your mood. Once inside, Handshake is a dimly lit speakeasy in Juárez where the cocktail program leans heavily on vintage spirits and the whole room feels like someone's very expensive idea of the 1920s. It holds the number two spot on the World's 50 Best Bars list, which the regulars probably know and definitely don't mention.

The name means "place of fire" in Nahuatl, and the Roma Norte agave bar commits to that fully: monochrome earthy materials, sparse dramatic lighting, burning incense, and a design meant to feel like walking into an ancient tomb. It's moody in the way that actually works, where the atmosphere doesn't fight the drinking. North America's 50 Best Bars ranked it fifth, and The World's 50 Best Bars placed it at 23.

Black-and-white photos of a man named Mauro watch over the room while his grandsons run the bar below him, which tells you most of what you need to know about Bar Mauro. This Italian cocktail bar in Roma Norte pours vermouth and amari the way Milan used to, somewhere between a classic aperitivo hour and a very considered modern lounge. Ranked second on North America's 50 Best Bars, it also holds a spot on the World's 50 Best Bars list.

A mushroom-shaped rock formation called El Hongo rises from the shallows of this protected bay outside La Paz, and it has become something of an unofficial mascot for one of the world's genuinely spectacular beaches. Strict regulations cap visitor numbers and freeze development, so the water stays that improbable turquoise and the sand stays clean. Seven coves sit within the bay, the tide never clears chest height, and you can walk between them all.

The water in this small inlet sits noticeably calmer than the churned-up surf at beaches nearby, which is why swimmers keep coming back. Xpu-Ha sits between Playa del Carmen and Tulum without quite belonging to either scene, and the sand is the fine, powdery kind that resists any reasonable description. Ranked among the World's 50 Best Beaches, it rewards anyone willing to skip the loud beach clubs down the road.

Stone-block courtyard, old-growth trees, ivy-wrapped columns, and a wrap-around terrace before you've even looked at the menu. El Tigre Silencioso is a cantina in Roma Norte where the setting does a lot of the talking and the kitchen answers back with creative Mexican cooking that likes unexpected combinations. The open kitchen and corner bar keep things loose, and the crowd tends to dress like they've been here before.

Neon kanji on the walls, sake threading through nearly every cocktail on the menu, custom glassware on every table: this Japanese cocktail bar in Juárez commits to the bit without feeling like a theme park. Sit down, order something from a list that leans hard on East Asian flavors, and let okonomiyaki or a katsu sando arrive alongside. It landed at number 25 on North America's 50 Best Bars in 2026.

The bar's name comes from the Tzotzil word for "seed," and that's not just branding. Bekeb is a plant-driven cocktail bar in San Miguel de Allende that builds its menu around Mexican produce and spirits, with a non-alcoholic list treated as seriously as the rest. Ranked 24th on North America's 50 Best Bars, it draws the kind of crowd that comes to drink deliberately rather than just drink.

Three spa centers, a working organic farm, and miles of private mountain trails sprawl across 4,000 acres just south of the Tecate border crossing, an hour from San Diego. This is a full-week wellness resort where the schedule runs from Watsu to aerial yoga to Feldenkrais, and the guests who come once tend to keep coming back. Vogue named it one of the 100 Best Spas in the World, which tracks for a place that feels less like a resort and more like a utopian village someone actually built.

SHA Wellness Clinic in Costa Mujeres matches its treatment rooms to its guest rooms, which tells you something about what kind of trip this is. It's a medical wellness resort where ozone IVs and stem cell treatments share a menu with massages and sound baths, and you can get hormone screenings between sessions. Vogue named it among its 100 Best Spas in the World. People come here for a full biological audit, not a cucumber eye mask.

You reach this Forbes Five Star, Michelin two-key resort by passing through a tunnel blasted through Pedregal Mountain, which sets the tone neatly. Every room faces the Pacific, and a personal assistant is assigned before you arrive, ready to arrange dolphin swims, a curandera session at the spa, or a private breakfast beside your plunge pool. This is emphatically not spring-break Cabo; it's the version where someone else handles all of it.

Perched on the cliffs of Punta Ballena where the Pacific meets the Sea of Cortez, Esperanza is a 57-suite Auberge resort with the only private beach in Los Cabos, so the seclusion is structural, not just a vibe. Casitas have terraces and ocean views; the Cocina del Mar restaurant is carved into the bluff. The palapa spa goes deep on traditional medicine wheel treatments. Forbes Five Star and two Michelin Keys. Celebrities come, and the Frette linens apparently come standard.

Mezcal is the spine of the menu here, which makes sense given that Oaxaca is basically ground zero for the stuff. Selva is a cocktail bar that leans hard into local and seasonal ingredients, building drinks around the landscape rather than the back bar. A spot on North America's 50 Best Bars says the room is doing something worth noticing. Come for the cocktails and stay because the food snacks keep arriving and nobody seems to be in a rush.

A protected cove with waves breaking onto what may be Cabo's finest beach sits just below this Forbes Five Star resort, which also holds a spot on the World's 50 Best Hotels list. The 122 rooms and 52 residences lean into contemporary Mexican design with an indoor-outdoor flow that makes walls feel optional. The bay delivers serious snorkeling and diving, the infinity pool handles the lazy afternoon, and the spa is the largest on the Baja peninsula, if you're keeping score.

A former parking garage turned stuccoed cocktail bar, Mecenas lands at number 18 on North America's 50 Best Bars list. The name nods to the Roman arts patron, and the ethos follows: everything here is made with care, from spirits to reductions brewed in-house. Liqueurs follow Jalisco's tradition of cane alcohol distillation, with neutral cane spirit as the base for things like limoncello and lavender cream.

Cesar Pelli's Torre Libertad glass tower on the Paseo de la Reforma is a hard building to miss, and the St. Regis fills its upper floors with the kind of service that other hotels quietly gave up on years ago. Every guest gets a dedicated butler around the clock, the staff learns your name fast, and the rooms come with deep soaking tubs and city views that stretch to the mountains on a clear day. A Forbes Four Star hotel.

The rooms at this Rosewood resort start at over 900 square feet and come with pebble-inlaid floors, adobe fireplaces, and a semi-private plunge pool on the patio, which sets a fairly clear tone for everything else. The infinity pool along the Sea of Cortez is vast enough that you can genuinely pretend you've swum out to meet the porpoises. It holds a Forbes Five Star, two Michelin Keys, and a spot at number 44 on the World's 50 Best Hotels list.

An open-air palapa built on sand in the Tulum jungle, Arca is a contemporary Mexican restaurant where nearly everything passes over live fire and the menu follows whatever the farmers showed up with that week. The chef, originally from Tijuana, drags Baja street-food instincts deep into the Caribbean jungle with results that feel neither beachy nor precious. It holds a spot on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list, and the bar is no afterthought either.

Boats bring you to your room here, which should tell you most of what you need to know. Rosewood Mayakoba is a luxury resort on the Riviera Maya where the villas and suites sit among canals, lagoons, and mangrove forest, each with a private plunge pool and some perched on stilts above the water. A tequila library and a raw bar handle evenings. It holds a Forbes Five Star and appears on the World's 50 Best Hotels list.

A promontory perch above the Sea of Cortez, where the Pacific and the Cortez waters meet at the tip of Baja, gives this Forbes Five Star, Michelin two-key resort a setting that does a lot of the work. The 55 acres of cliffside villas and suites come with butler service, a sprawling spa, a Jack Nicklaus golf course, and one of the few swimmable beaches on this stretch of coast. The crowd runs younger and more photogenic than the Bing Crosby era, but the instinct is the same.

A colonial-style hacienda hidden behind jungle and coconut palms on a stretch of Riviera Maya beach that makes the Caribbean look like it's showing off. Maroma is a Belmond luxury resort holding a Forbes Five Star, two Michelin Keys, and a spot on the World's 50 Best Hotels. Furniture and artwork are made in the hotel's own workshop, the temazcal sits right on the sand, and Curtis Stone has a restaurant here, because of course he does.

Rosewood San Miguel de Allende holds a Forbes Five Star and looks like it has always belonged to the city's UNESCO-listed colonial centro, which is either a feat of restraint or a very long con. The rooms lean hard into 19th-century aesthetics while quietly hiding deep soaking tubs and fireplaces, and the rooftop bar trades the best views in town for a tequila. Three pools, a spa, and weekend crowds who dressed for exactly this.

Every room at this Ritz-Carlton Reserve comes with its own plunge pool, which tells you something about how seriously the place takes leisure. A 115-room resort on the Sea of Cortez where the architecture takes its cues from Baja rather than a European palace, the décor leans into local motifs, and butlers come standard. The spa draws a devoted crowd, and the restaurants track Los Cabos' food culture. It holds a Forbes Five Star and two Michelin Keys.

The sail-shaped towers aren't just a design flex; "vela" means sail in Spanish, and this family-owned company leans into it hard. Grand Velas is a Forbes Five Star all-inclusive resort on the Sea of Cortez, which means the open bar and included dining come wrapped in architecture that looks like it's about to catch a breeze and head for the horizon. The kind of place where the biggest decision is which pool.

Punta Nizuc juts into the Caribbean facing one of the largest barrier reefs in the world, which is the kind of address that does a lot of the heavy lifting for a resort. NIZUC holds a Forbes Five Star and fills its roughly 300 suites and villas with rainfall showers, deep soaking tubs, and balconies pointed at either the ocean or garden infinity pools. Open architecture keeps the breeze moving, and six restaurants cover everything from high-end Mexican to Peruvian to Italian.

A courtyard garden with a classical fountain sits at the center of this Reforma luxury hotel, giving the whole place the quiet logic of a colonial estate dropped into one of the city's busiest corridors. Rooms are calm and neutral, bathrooms run to sunken tubs and Floris products, and the pool deck overlooks a second tucked-away courtyard. Fifty Mils downstairs has its own following. Forbes Four Star.

The bar takes its name from a Yucatan tree that the Maya associated with hospitality, which sets the tone neatly. Zapote Bar is a cocktail bar inside a luxury resort in Playa del Carmen, where the drinks lean hard into local ingredients and Mayan references rather than the usual tropical-hotel playlist. North America's 50 Best Bars has it at number 95. The crowd tends toward guests who wandered in for one drink and lost track of time entirely.

The name means "alcoves," and the hotel takes that literally, keeping rooms quietly private and exquisitely unhurried in the middle of Polanco's very well-heeled shopping corridor. Yabu Pushelberg did the interiors, which means monochrome whites and blacks, good wood, and a faint whiff of Manhattan confidence that somehow doesn't feel out of place. A boutique luxury hotel with a spa and a restaurant on-site, and a Forbes Four Star rating to its name.

One of the very few swimmable beaches on this stretch of Baja coastline makes Chileno Bay an outlier before you even check in. The Auberge Collection resort sits in a protected cove halfway between San Jose and Cabo San Lucas, its bleached-wood minimalism stepping back so the three-tiered infinity pool and Sea of Cortez can do the talking. Rooms start at a generous 760 square feet with a soaking tub and outdoor shower. It holds a Forbes Five Star and two Michelin Keys.

Floors 37 through 47 of one of the city's tallest towers, with floor-to-ceiling windows aimed straight at Reforma Avenue and Chapultepec Park. This luxury hotel puts you so far above the neighboring skyline that Mexico City stops feeling chaotic and starts feeling almost legible. The spa, indoor pool, and a rooftop cocktail bar keep you happily on-property, though the whole point is the view that greets you every time you look up.

Six Spanish Colonial mansions on a cobblestone street in San Miguel's historic center, each with its own floor plan and working fireplaces, make up this Belmond boutique hotel. Thirty-seven rooms means the staff actually learns your name. There's a full spa, a casual restaurant, and a cooking school teaching Mexican cuisine for when you feel like doing something with your day. A Forbes Four Star and Michelin two-key property.

A suite-only adults resort on the Riviera Maya where the architect treated the building as a living sculpture, weaving local rock, jungle plants, and water through every common space. The boutique is stocked with Mexican art and textiles by designer Carla Fernández, who also dressed the staff. A spa leans into Mayan mysticism, and dinner at a cenote is on the itinerary. Every suite faces the Caribbean. It holds a Forbes Five Star.

A jungle road narrow enough to make you question the GPS leads to this intimate beachside resort sprawling across fifty acres between Tulum and Playa del Carmen. The main house was once a European duchess's home, and the guest rooms, jungle suites, and freestanding bungalows still carry that privately owned feeling. Three restaurants, an organic spa, and two pale blue pools sit between you and the white sand beach. It holds a Forbes Five Star and Michelin's 3 Keys.

Two houses, one Neo-colonial from the forties and a modernist addition next door, were joined and turned into 19 rooms across from Lincoln Park in one of the city's most polished neighborhoods. The boutique hotel holds a Michelin two-key distinction and reads like a private home where someone had genuinely good taste, with marble bathrooms and a curated mix of objects across eras. A spa, a serious breakfast, and afternoon tea fill the gaps where a restaurant would be.

Each private villa opens directly onto a lagoon, with a pool large enough that you'll forget the resort has a beach at all (it does, a short boat ride down the canal). This Forbes Four Star, Michelin 2 Key resort in the Mayakoba enclave blends Asian hospitality with Mayan surroundings, and the mangroves, herons, and occasional crocodile do most of the decorating. Rates start around $500 a night, which buys you a convincing illusion that Playa del Carmen simply doesn't exist.

Every room at this Forbes Four Star, Michelin Key resort opens onto a private terrace facing the water, with the famous Arch of Cabo San Lucas visible across the bay. The architect leaned into the landscape rather than competing with it, so the timber walls and hand-painted tile floors feel grounded even as the infinity pool and rooftop lounge float above Monuments Beach. Enrique Olvera oversees the flagship restaurant, which should tell you something about the ambition level.

The Alexander sits inside Torre Virreyes, the inverted-triangle skyscraper that looms over Bosque de Chapultepec like it won an architecture argument. This 26-suite hotel holds a Michelin Key and leans hard into international luxury: Italian furniture, Swedish bath products, Bang & Olufsen sound systems, and a caviar bar that apparently no one thought to open in Mexico City before now. Floor-to-ceiling windows keep the park and skyline permanently in frame.

Waiters who wade into the surf to deliver drinks to guests mid-wave set the tone for this Forbes Five Star, Michelin two-key resort on its own quiet spit of coast above Puerto Vallarta. Fifty-two acres of jungle and white sand, two private beaches, and a range of pools give the place the feel of a small principality. Casitas, suites, and villas all face the water, and the beach-boho aesthetic is consistent enough that you won't feel shortchanged by your room tier.

The spa is built around a cenote, a natural underground pool the ancient Maya considered sacred, which sets the tone for this wellness resort buried in the Yucatán jungle about 25 minutes from Mérida. The 40 casitas each come with a private pool; the restored hacienda villa adds its own spa suite and gym. Jorge Vallejo of Quintonil oversees the restaurants. One of the World's 50 Best Hotels, and holds two Michelin Keys.

A shaman meets you at the entrance to help you set an intention for your stay, which is either the most Riviera Maya thing imaginable or a genuinely useful prompt to put your phone down. Either way, the resort earns it. Stone-and-wood towers rise above a mangrove forest on elevated walkways, every room facing the sea, local art on every surface. The SANA spa, several restaurants, and a beach club are all a short walk. Michelin awarded it 2 Keys.

A Mayan shaman greets arriving guests with a copal blessing before a bellman walks them through dense jungle to a thatched-palapa villa with its own in-room check-in. This adults-only boutique resort along the Riviera Maya keeps just 41 villas, a pool with a sea view, and a bar stocked with rare tequilas. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key, and Forbes gives it Four Stars. Couples looking to disappear into the jungle without sacrificing comfort tend to find it.

A Diego Rivera portrait in the owner's private collection gave this 32-room boutique hotel its name, and the curatorial instinct runs through the whole place: crisp white cubist architecture, contemporary art on every wall, and mountain views from most of the private terraces. It sits on a quiet cobblestone street a short walk from San Miguel's main plaza, holding a Michelin Key. The spa has a hammam, and the in-house restaurant leans into locally sourced Mexican cooking.

Villas sit either in the treetops or on coastal cliffs above the Pacific, each with a private plunge pool and round-the-clock butler service, which tells you exactly what kind of resort this is. It holds a Michelin 3 Keys and ranks among the World's 50 Best Hotels. Enrique Olvera runs the clifftop restaurant. The spa brings in traditional healers for indigenous ceremonies, because a plunge pool apparently isn't enough.

A 40-floor tower on the Paseo de la Reforma, the Sofitel plants its French flag firmly in Mexico City and then, to its credit, actually looks around. The rooms lean into the view through floor-to-ceiling windows, with warm modernist interiors and automated curtains softening the high-rise drama. Downstairs there's a wood-fired Mediterranean-Mexican kitchen and a French-meets-Mexican rooftop bar, which is exactly as audacious as it sounds. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

Three circular buildings hover above a red mangrove forest, designed to mirror the Pleiades constellation as it appears overhead each December. This St. Regis resort sits on a private beach cove beside the Sian Ka'an Biosphere Reserve, well away from the party strip. Ground-floor rooms have plunge pools; suites add hammocks and outdoor showers. Butler service, a Forbes Four Star, and a Michelin Key round out the case for staying in rather than going anywhere.

A hanging alebrije sculpture installation stops you in the lobby before you've even checked in, and the hotel keeps that promise throughout. This 144-room property sits steps from Santo Domingo Church in Oaxaca's UNESCO-listed historic center, built around interior patios that draw light through every corridor. Local wood, stone, and clay pottery throughout feel chosen rather than decorated. The Agave Lounge handles mezcal duties; the spa leans on regional therapeutic traditions.

Each of the five "casas" here is themed to a different Mexican art form, textiles or painting or cooking, and guests can take a workshop in whichever one they pick. It's a sprawling adults-only all-inclusive resort on the Riviera Maya, 900 suites deep, with access to eight Xcaret parks folded into the rate. The Forbes Four Star property leans into curated craft over swim-up-bar chaos, which is either a selling point or a warning, depending on your vacation personality.

The swim-up bar at Blue Marlin Ibiza says everything: ME Cabo is an adults-only beach resort where the pool party is the amenity, not an afterthought. Spain's Meliá group planted its nightlife-forward ME brand right on Playa El Médano, Cabo's only swimmable beach, and the rooms, each with a balcony, lean into the hedonist brief with counted thread counts and sea views to sleep off the night before.

A new-build resort in a city where colonial stone walls are the whole aesthetic is a bold move, and Live Aqua pulls it off with AoMa Estudio's colonial-meets-contemporary design and modern art threaded throughout. The largest hotel in town, it holds a Forbes Four Star rating and draws expats and visitors who want serious amenities: a fine-dining room from celebrity chef Eduardo Palazuelos, a Casa Dragones tequila lounge, and generous outdoor spaces.

Each room comes with an onsen-style teak soaking tub, which tells you immediately what kind of resort this is. Nobu Hotel Los Cabos sits at the far edge of Cabo San Lucas, and the Japanese aesthetic carries through from the architecture to the pools to the spa, all of it sitting against the Pacific. Four pools, multiple bars, and a Nobu restaurant anchor the property. It holds a Forbes Four Star rating, and somehow the understated design never fights the Baja landscape for attention.

Floor-to-ceiling sliding doors frame the Sea of Cortez from every room at this Forbes Four Star resort on the Baja Peninsula, which opened recently enough that the towels still feel new. The Riviera-inspired buildings use natural stone and earthy tones so the whole property reads as landscape rather than interruption. Three restaurants, an open-air spa, and several pools fill out the days for guests who came to do absolutely nothing, efficiently.

Canals thread through the mangrove forest right up to your room, so the line between resort and jungle stays genuinely blurry throughout your stay. This is a large luxury resort just north of Playa del Carmen, with nine pools, a Forbes Four Star rating, and enough complimentary activities, paddleboarding, catamaran tours, mezcal tastings, yoga, to keep a planner busy or an avoider pleasantly distracted. The adults-only infinity pool gazes out over the canals and mangroves, which is as good an argument for day-drinking as any.

Sandy beach frontage is genuinely rare on this stretch of the Sea of Cortez, and Solaz built its whole pitch around it. The resort sits between Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo on 34 acres of desert landscape, with 145 rooms, four restaurants, and a serious spa. Huanacaxtle wood details and original Mexican sculpture keep the interiors from reading like every other coastal property. It holds a Forbes Four Star, and somehow manages to be both family-friendly and stylish, which is harder than it sounds.

The resort that Mexican architect Miguel Ángel Aragonés built here looks like a fever dream of floating white cubes mirrored in still reflecting pools, and it lands harder in person than in photographs. This is a hotel in San José del Cabo, the quieter end of the coast, with 186 rooms done in clean Poliform interiors and floor-to-ceiling windows facing the sea. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

Private cabanas with a dedicated coconut cocktail attendant set the tone at this luxury Caribbean resort on the Zona Hotelera strip. The water really does run that improbable shade of blue, and the beach makes it easy to lose a full day without trying. Families and couples both seem equally at home here, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. Kempinski holds a Forbes Four Star rating.

Six miles of private beach and a no-tipping policy are enough to make the point, but the Four Seasons Tamarindo also sits on a 3,000-acre nature reserve where the hotel itself is almost apologetically small compared to the jungle around it. A Forbes Four Star resort on Mexico's Costalegre coast, it offers cliffside suites with in-ground tubs, three infinity pools, a working farm, and scuba outings. The hammock tends to win.

The wave-shaped architecture here is a nod to an ancient asteroid impact, which is either the most Riviera Maya thing imaginable or the most EDITION thing imaginable, possibly both. Ian Schrager's luxury resort on the Kanai coast runs 182 rooms done in blonde wood and upscale minimalism, all deferring to the view. The lagoon-style main pool is the gravitational center once you arrive, and cenote-inspired plantings cascade through common spaces.

Tucked into 100 acres of mangroves south of Cancún, this 173-room luxury resort manages to feel genuinely secluded in a stretch of coastline that is very much neither of those things. Rooms run to private balconies and Aesop toiletries without a trace of tropical kitsch, the spa draws on Maya ritual, and two infinity pools hang over a private beach. It holds a Michelin Key and a Forbes Four Star.