Review: Chablé Yucatán

Why book?

Chablé Yucatán is a different and even unique Mexican property, a jungle paradise where a historic hacienda is paired with boldly contemporary guest villas in an off-the-beaten-path corner of Mexico. For travelers headed to this part of the Yucatan peninsula, you won’t find a more luxurious option while Mayan sites and colonial towns nearby wait to be explored.

Set the scene

Most guests at Chablé Yucatán arrive via Mérida, the capital of the state of Yucatán which is 25 miles to the northeast of the property. Chocholá, the humble town where the resort is located, has a population of fewer than 5,000 residents and most guests will only pass through it en route to the resort. Once you arrive at the property, you may feel like you have entered a private Eden where pint-sized Yucatán deer can be spotted on the lawns, nibbling on the jungle foliage, largelyindifferent to guests. Overhead a variety of tropical birds fly through the sky and perch on treetops, their calls providing a unique soundtrack to your stay.

The property’s 41 casitas are located along three roadswithin the resort—each casita comes with bikes and golfcarts can be quickly summoned if you don’t want to walk to the main house, spa, the 9-hole golf course, or other parts of the property. The casitas feel remarkably private thanks to some masterful landscaping—even though many are physically close to the small roads they are located on, dense walls of foliage effectively screen them from anyone passing by.

If you decide to venture off property, the ancient andimpressive Mayan city of Uxmal, located less than an hour to the south, is the most obvious destination besides Mérida. There are also many smaller Mayan sites as well as cenotes (sinkholes filled with freshwater that offer cool relief on hot days) nearby. The clientele at Chablé has primarily been couples looking for a quiet, romantic retreat in an exotic tropical setting though the property is making a play to attract more families with the addition of a kid’s club and a small farm with a petting zoo, both new in 2024.

The backstory

The Chablé family of hotels now includes three properties—the original in the state of Yucatán and two in the neighboring state of Quintana Roo (one at Punta Maroma and the other next to the Sian Ka’an Biosphere). Four more properties, all in Mexico, are planned: Chablé Mar de Cortés (scheduled to open late 2026), Chablé Valle de Guadalupe (late 2026), Chablé Costa Alegre (2027), and Casa Chablé Merida (no opening date scheduled).

The Mexican-owned hotel group spent several years restoring the original hacienda building, converting its machine hall into the gourmet restaurant Ixi’im, and constructing the spa, guest casitas, and other new buildings. The hotel’s seamless mix of styles with the historic hacienda sharing the 750-acre estate with the contemporary additions quickly earned it architecture and design awards, as well as a loyal following. It even helped to elevate the profile of the entire state of Yucatan by offering a hacienda experience that surpassed its competitors when it comes to luxury.

The rooms

While the original hacienda buildings are decidedly old-school, with their colorful pasta tiles, shaded arcades overlooking the resort’s lawns, and even a small, beautifulchapel with an antique carved and gilded wood altar, the casitasopt for a contemporary look. Each measures over 2,100 square feet and they were designed by Mexican architect Jorge Borga.With most of them you follow a short path through the remains of a structure from the original hacienda, now left in a picturesque state of decay, before you reach your casita. Each has its own private pool and the design includes walls of glass that look out on a dense jungle landscape. While much of the Yucatan peninsula is covered by rain forest, the landscape designers improved on nature here creating a jungle that is less scrubby than the real thing and instead planted with dramatic Mexican fan palms and other tropical trees that create a solid green wall. The interiors of the rooms are by Paulina Morán and warm stone in a creamy off-white is paired with dark tropical hardwoods. There are some local touches in the form of embroidered pillowcases and handmade soap and shampoo dispensers, but Morán avoided the too-common impulse to go overboard and fill rooms with typically Mexican crafts and art.

Food and drink

Even if you are familiar with Mexican cuisine, the Yucatan peninsula has its own distinct dishes. At the more casual Ki’ol and through the resort’s culinary experiences you can enjoy excellent renditions of dishes like panuchos (masa dough stuffed with beans, fried, and topped with turkey or porkwith tomatoes, onions, and lettuce), salbutes (the same idea, minus the beans), sopa de lima (a soup, most often made with chicken stock, flavored with lime juice), and, perhaps the region’s most famous dish, cochinita pibil—pork marinated with achiote and bitter orange. The hotel prepares it the traditional way: wrapping it in leaves and burying it under a layer of coals. Enjoying a taco of cochinita pibil with pickled onions immediately after it has been unearthed is a not-to-be-missed opportunity. On our visit, the tacos were served in an impromptu gathering a little after 9 a.m.—tacos are breakfast food in Mexico. If you want to make sure to enjoy this experience, just let the staff knows of your interest and they’ll make sure you don’t miss it.

At the gourmet Ixi’im, the constantly changing menu focuses on seasonal cuisine and local ingredients, in creative and delicious dishes. Standouts on our visit included a venison risotto cooked pibil-style with oregano grown on the propertyand local grilled octopus with a puree flavored with longanizasausage from the nearby town of Temozón. The restaurant’s signature cocktail, the Hacendado, consists of lemon, ginger, chipotle syrup and mezcal. Ixi’im offers tasting and a la carte menus, and the former can include cocktail and wine pairings. The restaurant happily accommodated our request for mocktail pairings instead of ones with alcohol. For those who do drink the restaurant has an extensive tequila collection with more than 3,500 different bottles and an impressive selection of mezcals as well.

The new Abu’s Kitchen restaurant has a menu focused on farm-to-table dishes that highlight ingredients grown on the property. It opened after our visit.

The spa

The large spa and wellness center goes all in on incorporating Mayan-inspired rituals and local products, some grown and harvested at the resort, into its treatments. A treatment may begin by being blessed with copal incense and one treatment room overlooks a cenote located next to the spa facility— cenotes hold spiritual significance in Mayan religion, as portals into the underworld. There is also a temezcal, a sweat lodge used by many Mesoamerican peoples, where guests can participate in a purification ritual.

The neighborhood/area

Most guests at Chablé skip over thesmall town of Chocholá where the resort is located. There isn’t much of interest though the colonial-era church and town square are the lively centers of daily life. If you want to venture beyond the property, Mérida, to the northeast, makes for an easy day trip as does the Maya site of Uxmal, to the south. The latter rivals Chichén Itzá in its splendor and size but receives far fewer visitors. At other smaller Maya sites like Labna, Sayil, and Kabah you may find yourself either completely alone or sharing them with only a handful of other visitors.

While in some other states of Mexico, it would be advisable to exercise caution before traveling alone through small towns and on backcountry roads, the state of Yucatan is famously very safe and most of the highways as well as local roads are in relatively good condition. If you keep an eye open for the occasional potholes as well as topes, or speedbumps, which are very popular throughout Mexico in smaller towns and villages, you can explore without worry. Driving after dark is not recommended mostly as many roads are not well lit.

The service

While service at Chablé is warm and welcoming, it’s never stiff and formal. The staff instead conveys a sincere joy at welcoming guests to their corner of Mexico. There’s an enthusiasm around sharing the culture and cuisine of Yucatán, in particular, that’s palpable. If you have questions, say, for a cook about the differences between red and black recados (spice mixtures used in many Yucatecan dishes), or if you ask a groundskeeper to identify a certain birdcall, you may find yourself receiving a long and thoughtful answer that goes far beyond your original question. When I realized after the fact that my photograph of a container for tortillas with a hand painted deer had come out blurry, the first staff member I approached dropped everything and spent 20 minutes tracking down the particular container I wanted to photograph again. He was successful and I’m certain he wouldn’t have stopped until he was.

For families

Most of Chablé’s casitas are one-bedroom units, which may not be ideal for many families with younger children, but there are two 2-bedroom family casitas and the Presidential and Royal Villas have three bedrooms each. Until this year Chablé’s programming largely focused on adults but anew farm space presents kid-friendly introductions to farming and gardening and includes a petting zoo with especially social pigs, goats, rabbits, and miniature horses and burros. Also new in 2024 is a kid’s club.

Eco effort

The resort has adopted environmental and sustainability initiatives on a number of fronts. Plastic water bottles have been largely eliminated as the resort purifies and bottles its own water. Solar panels produce some 60% of the resort’s energy. Melipona bees, which play a key role in the local ecosystem, are raised on the property and guests can tour the area with their hives and learn about these bees and the health benefits of the honey they produce.

Accessibility

The resort has one Casita Double (with two queenbeds) that is fully accessible. They also have ramps in the restaurants and they can complete check-in and check-out at the guests’ casita if they prefer.

Anything left to mention?

Keep your eyes open, though also keep your distance, for the local deer that are being bred and reintroduced on the property. These deer are smaller than those typical in North America, according to one member of the staff because the deer never had to evolve to become taller to reach higher branches on trees when there was such an abundance of leaves to eat in the Yucatán jungle. The deer can occasionally be spotted on the lawn that separates the casitas from the main building and on the paths through the property.

Finally, a note about prices. Chablé is easily the most expensive hotel in the state of Yucatan and would likely make any list of Mexico’s most expensive hotels. If you compare room rates and the prices for food to other properties in the region, they may feel exorbitant though at the same time the hotel is far more luxurious than anything else around. If you compare the prices to those a luxury Caribbean resort might charge, any sticker shock may feel less painful—by some measures compared to other luxury resorts in the same class of properties where you might escape to in the winter, Chablé may even look like a bargain.