Chablé Yucatan is a magical place. Twenty-five minutes away from Mérida, the historic city and capital of Yucatán state, the resort is set within the heart of the Mayan forest and spread amply across 750 acres of the Yucatán peninsula. It is imbued with a special quality. Accommodations are built on the grounds of the 200-year-old San Antonio hacienda, a former cattle ranch, later a factory for the production of sisal, the natural fiber once used in the making of rope. Chablé’s signature and award-winning spa is built beside a cenote, a type of subterranean pool found throughout the Yucatán and since ancient times considered sacred by the Maya.
A team of Mexican designers is responsible for creating Chablé’s enchanting realm. Architect Jorge Borja designed the spacious casitas, each with a private pool, in addition to a presidential and a splendid royal villa, all in a contemporary style evocative of Mayan architecture—its horizontal forms, stepped platforms, and open structures—embellished with various tropical woods: cumaru, ceiba, and parota. Each casita encompasses 2,200-square-feet and affords the degree of privacy that assures luxuriant seclusion. They feature outdoor showers, terraces with sunbeds, and hammocks. Interior décor is by Paulina Moran, also responsible for the award-winning spa. Landscape designer Pedro Pablo Velasco mediates Chablé’s varied environments—hacienda, jungle, cenote—to create lush and tranquil settings for accommodations, spa, and restaurants.
Chablé is imbued with a special quality, where the past nurtures the present.
The expansive Chablé Spa extends over 32,000-square-feet with nine treatment rooms that overlook the cenote. Additional facilities include a sauna, steam room, warm and cold whirlpools, as well as a pool. In addition to a full complement of spa treatments, including those inspired by Mayan traditions, an extensive wellness and fitness program ranges from Zen meditation, various yoga practices, Tai Chi, Pilates and high-intensity interval cycling, among others. Particular to Chablé is the temazcal, a pre-Hispanic treatment in a sweat lodge, as much spiritual ceremony as curative treatment.
Jorge Vallejo, chef of the acclaimed Quintonil in Mexico City, oversees Chablé’s three restaurants, including Ixi’im—“corn” in the Mayan language—for fine dining. The restaurant design integrates a modern, steel-and-glass structure with walls of the former hacienda. In the bar, walls of illuminated shelves display a comprehensive collection of premium tequila and mezcal. Strands of sisal rope hang from the ceiling, a decorative touch and a nod to the hacienda’s past. Vallejo’s vanguard menu features such dishes as a tamal colado filled with blue crayfish, in a spicy seafood stew; octopus, with lentils and longaniza sausage; and a magret of duck, with zucchini blossoms, in a huitlacoche mole sauce.
Steps from Ixi’im is the resort’s organic Mayan garden, where vegetables, herbs, and fruits are cultivated for the farm-to-table menus of Chablé’s restaurants. Its traditional indigenous design is distinguished by raised garden beds, which are tended by the resort’s resident Maya horticulturist. Here, as elsewhere throughout Chablé, the past nurtures the present.