Maroma, A Belmond Hotel

José Luis Moreno bought the land at Punta Maroma in the 1970s, when the coast south of Cancún was jungle and fishing camps, and built himself a house among the palms. The hotel he opened there in 1995 kept the spirit of the house: low white buildings with domed roofs and thatched palapas, set back from a beach of fine sand on a bay that faces east. Orient-Express Hotels bought it in 2002, the company became Belmond in 2014, and after a two-year closure Maroma, A Belmond Hotel reopened on the Riviera Maya in August 2023.

History

Moreno was an architect by training and built Maroma over years, using local limestone, stucco and the Mayan technique of chukum plaster, and planting the grounds so that the buildings disappeared into them. By the 1990s the property had a reputation among Mexican and American travellers as the alternative to the hotel towers of Cancún, and it was among the first hotels on this coast to pass to an international group when Orient-Express took it in 2002. Belmond's renovation, begun in 2021, was the deepest in its history: the structures were kept, the interiors and the gardens remade, and the hotel reopened in August 2023 with Tara Bernerd's interiors and new restaurants.

Architecture and design

The architecture is still Moreno's: whitewashed walls, domes, arches and vaults in the local manner, thatched roofs over the open-air rooms, paths of stone through the palms. Tara Bernerd, the London designer, worked with Mexican artisans on the interiors, commissioning textiles, ceramics and furniture from workshops in Oaxaca, Jalisco and Yucatán, so that the rooms read as Mexican rather than generic tropical. The palette is white, sand and the green of the gardens, with colour in the weaving and the tile.

Rooms and suites

There are 72 rooms and suites in a scatter of one- and two-storey buildings between the gardens and the beach. Garden rooms sit among the planting; beachfront rooms and suites open onto the sand. The suites add terraces, plunge pools or private gardens, and the largest have their own pools and butlers.

Dining

Casa Mayor, under a great palapa, is the main restaurant, with a menu of Yucatecan and wider Mexican cooking built around a wood fire and a tortilla station. Woodend by Curtis Stone is the Australian chef's open-fire restaurant on the beach. Bambuco by Handshake brings the Mexico City bar group's cocktails to the beach bar. There is also a cafe and a beach club service for the day.

Wellness

The Maroma Spa by Guerlain is the first Guerlain spa in Mexico, in a set of pavilions and gardens with treatment rooms, a temazcal for traditional steam ceremonies, a hydrotherapy area and treatments developed with honey from the resort's own Melipona bees. A pool by the beach is the main swimming pool.

Weddings and events

Maroma is one of the best-known wedding venues on the Riviera Maya, with ceremonies on the beach and in the gardens, dinners under the palapas and the whole hotel available for exclusive use. Meetings and incentive groups use the private dining rooms and garden pavilions; there is no ballroom.

Location

Punta Maroma is about 30 kilometres south of Cancún airport and 15 north of Playa del Carmen, off the main coastal highway in Quintana Roo. Cancún International is about 40 minutes by car, Playa del Carmen 20. Tulum and the ruins of the Yucatán interior are day trips; the reef offshore is part of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, and snorkelling and diving start from the beach. The hotel is a luxury resort on the Riviera Maya in the old sense: a bay, a beach and a garden, with the road out of sight.