The 10 Best Resorts in Taiwan

Hot springs rise from a Central Mountain valley in Taiwan, and the Japanese Hoshinoya group built their first overseas property around them. It runs like a ryokan, with public baths and private in-room ones, multi-course kaiseki meals, and rooms that frame the surrounding green gorge as if it were part of the decor. A Michelin Key property, and one that takes the Japanese slow-stay concept seriously enough that booking requires a call rather than a click.

A Song Dynasty painting served as the blueprint for this hill retreat in Xinpu, where a Taiwanese architect sent hundreds of artisans to work on hand-carved woodwork and winding courtyards. The layering of Jiangnan garden traditions, Fujian vernacular, and Baroque arcades reads less like a design mood board gone rogue and more like someone actually pulled it off. A hotel where the architecture is the argument.

About an hour outside Taipei, this ryokan-style resort sits inside the Wulai Mountains, where rooms have private hot spring baths and floor-to-ceiling windows aimed at the river. The public bathhouse runs to steam room, sauna, outdoor pool, and hydrotherapy pool, and mornings can start with Tai Chi if you'd like to feel very virtuous before lunch. A waterfall hike is also on offer, for those who need a reason to leave the bath.

The geothermal spring beneath Sun Moon Lake was unknown until renovations here turned it up, and it now feeds the natural hot spring baths in most rooms. This lakeside resort sits above the northern shore, and those wide windows make the lake's shifting light and color hard to ignore from bed. It's been around forever, but feels more restorative than historic, grounded in local presence and sustainability practices that don't announce themselves too loudly.

Every room at this 93-room lakeside resort has a private balcony and a hot spring pool, and the architect clearly knew not to compete with Sun Moon Lake. The interiors are pared back to the point of restraint, which sounds like a compromise until the mist rolls across the water at dawn and you realize the whole room was designed to frame that exact moment.

An all-suite resort on the shore of Sun Moon Lake, built from Chinese cypress and designed by Australian architect Kerry Hill to match the drama of the water and mountains outside every window. Each suite comes with a full living room and a balcony pointed straight at the lake, and the spa's hot and cold pools share the same view. Sun Moon Lake is not somewhere you stumble onto, which makes the effort feel deliberate in a good way.

A Victorian-inspired resort hotel that climbs 220 meters up Hualien's Coastal Mountain Range, with the Pacific on one side and the Central Range on the other. Rooms come with balconies as standard, and the Presidential Suite leans into the Buckingham Palace brief with William Morris fabrics and Wedgwood porcelain. The altitude earns its keep at sunrise, when the ocean lights up below and guests in dressing gowns briefly consider staying forever.

Rooms here face either the Pacific or the mountains behind Hualien, so picking a side is its own small drama. This is a resort in the real sense: the spa and the onsen-style spring-fed baths are reasons to stay in, not just amenities to photograph. The east coast keeps things from feeling like a city-hotel situation, even if the 252 rooms and the upscale dining options could pass for one on a grey Tuesday.