The Best Hotel Pools Across the World, In keeping with Opinionated Vacationers

There is a second, often someday after breakfast however earlier than lunch, when a resort pool settles into itself. The lap swimmers disappear. The kids drift towards the shallow finish. Someone orders the primary spherical of rosé. Sunglasses emerge. Towels unfurl. The summer season’s most talked-about novel is opened with ambition and deserted 20 minutes later. The day actually begins.

An awesome resort pool has nearly nothing to do with train. It is theater. A spot to see and be seen, definitely, but additionally a spot the place a resort reveals what sort of fantasy it’s serving. Some swimming pools promise Riviera glamour. Others commerce in barefoot privateness or old-money discretion. The greatest ones create a short lived world unto themselves — full with rituals, regulars, and an unstated social code that everybody instantly understands.

The mid-century resort might have perfected the shape. At locations just like the Rome Cavalieri, the Beverly Hills Hotel, or Gio Ponti’s Parco dei Principi in Sorrento, the pool stopped being an amenity and have become the gravitational middle of the property. Architects understood what hoteliers shortly realized: water, daylight, and a fantastically composed terrace could make folks really feel concurrently relaxed and impossibly engaging. “Like a great restaurant, a great pool provides the heartbeat and rhythm of a property,” says Grace Escaño-Maniatis, senior director of design at Auberge Collection. “It shapes the energy of everything around it.”

The swimming pool on the Beverly Hills Hotel in California is a favourite of discerning vacationers like tequila mogul Bertha González Nieves.

“The pool scene on the Cavalieri may be very La Grande Bellezza,” says Yolanda Edwards, founding father of Yolo Journal. “The same leathery tanned Romans with chunky gold watches and Pucci bikinis show up every day. The local regulars outnumber the tourists, which is what makes it feel so Roman.”

That is the actual trick of an excellent resort pool. It ought to really feel much less like infrastructure and extra like belonging.

Why We Go

A resort pool operates on a special logic than nearly every other amenity. The health club is solitary; the spa is silent; the restaurant is ritual; however the pool stays gloriously social within the oldest sense. It’s a typical area the place the standard guidelines of resort decorum loosen up and one thing extra attention-grabbing takes their place—conversations occur and alliances type. Gossip, it seems, is waterproof.

The pool at Greece’s Conrad Athens The Ilisian. T&C editor Stellene Volandes recommends “jumping in after a day of touring the ancient ruins.”

Edwards has a specific affection for Cuixmala on Mexico’s Pacific coast. “I’m not sure there’s a more sexy pool entrance than this one,” she says, “or a more meditative view from it—staring out to the wild Pacific with not a soul on the beach.” The greatest swimming pools one way or the other accommodate each impulses without delay: social spectacle and personal retreat.

“The ones that stick with me are Chateau Marmont, Hotel Saint Vincent, and Reschio,” says hotelier Liz Lambert. “There’s a through line. It’s about the grounds. It’s about feeling like you’ve slipped into someone’s private world. There is a sense of enclosure that makes it intimate and exceptional.”

Writer Christopher Bollen remembers the pool at Luxor’s Winter Palacemuch less as a scene than as salvation. “Luxor is so overloaded with ancient treasures, it’s not a destination that lends itself to downtime,” he says. “But the pool at the Winter Palace, right on the shores of the Nile, is an ideal respite from the Saharan sun—tucked away in a lush tropical garden.” The oasis impact, he provides, was so full it impressed his final novel, 2024’s wonderful Havoc..

The outside pool at La Mamounia in Marrakech.

That rigidity between spectacle and solitude is what separates a merely fairly pool from a memorable one.

The Architecture of Escape

Some swimming pools earn their mythology by way of ambiance alone. Others are merely thrilling items of design. Gio Ponti’s tiled saltwater pool on the Parco dei Principi in Sorrento stays one of many nice modernist gestures in hospitality—all geometry, sea air, and Mediterranean gentle. Using it feels much less like swimming and extra like taking part in a fantastically choreographed Italian fantasy.

Then there’s the Zodiac Pool at Umaid Bhawan Palace in Jodhpur: an underground chamber constructed for the Maharaja, its Indo-Deco geometry an ideal collision of European modernism and royal Rajasthani fantasy. “Sometimes they fill it with petals and candles,” says David Prior, founding father of an eponymous journey firm.

The pool at Capella Ubud in Bali is a favourite of journey professional David Prior.

Prior additionally factors to Capella Ubud, the place water dissolves nearly fully into panorama, rice paddies and rainforest merging with the water’s edge till you are feeling much less such as you’re swimming and extra like floating in a forest. At Singita Sasakwa Lodge, perched above the Serengeti, “you can often see the first scene of The Lion King play out in real time—in your swimsuit,” he says. (Speaking of swimsuits, Roland Herlory, CEO of Vilebrequin, the French luxurious swimwear firm, notes that, “With less to hide behind, what makes a well-suited man by the pool is confidence and a willingness to express personal style.”)

“The best pools always feel connected to where they are,” says Bertha González Nieves, CEO and co-founder of Casa Dragones tequila. “The pool needs to be a true destination within the hotel, its own special vibe. The architecture, the landscaping, the furniture, the towels, the pool temperature, the service, and last but not least, the cocktails. It all counts.”

No element is just too small in these environments. A moist towel deserted on a lounger from the earlier visitor can one way or the other undo thousands and thousands of {dollars} of design. “The towels are usually the tell,” Lambert says. “What I want—what I think everyone wants—is to arrive at a pool and feel like it was quietly prepared just for you.”

One of the 2 swimming swimming pools at Il San Corrado di Noto in Sicily.

Where to Make a Splash

The soon-to-reopen Delano in South Beach, after an in depth renovation, has at all times understood one thing the others are nonetheless determining. “The pool became the epicenter of poolside glamour,” says Ben Pundole, chief model officer of Delano. “A magnet for the fashion world, for celebrities, for anyone who understood that the pool was where the real action was. People want to enjoy their day-life the way they used to enjoy their nightlife.”

“Maybe I’m not a pool person,” admits author and photographer Chris Wallace. “But if we’re thinking of the pool as the nerve center of a property, it’s hard to beat.” He nominates as his favourite the swooping biomorphic pool at Villa Mabrouka in Tangier, all overgrown and nestled into the rocks overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar.

The pool at Singita Sasakwa Lodge, the place one fan notes that, “you can often see the first scene of The Lion King play out in real time—in your swimsuit.”

Stellene Volandes, editor in chief of Town & Country, has sturdy opinions about a number of swimming pools. The one on the Conrad Athens The Ilisian, previously the Hilton, is suffused with a specific form of collective reminiscence. “Semi-Olympic size, in the middle of Athens,” she says. “Jumping in after a day of touring the ancient ruins. It was what we all asked about first when we found out the Hilton was being renovated. It’s now called the Conrad but the pool is still there—and with much chicer furniture.” At Villa d’Este on Lake Como, the floating pool is sort of secondary to the strategy. “Walking to it from the gorgeous grandeur of the main building makes you feel like you are levitating,” she says. “But the club sandwich keeps you firmly down to earth.” At the Maybourne Riviera, the place T&C as soon as photographed Charlotte Casiraghi, the pool is constructed instantly into the mountain and floats above the Mediterranean. “You feel like you’re at the top of the world,” she says, “and you kind of are.”

At Il San Corrado di Noto in Sicily, Sarah Evans, accomplice at J/PR, remembers not simply the swimming pools themselves however the ambiance surrounding them. “There are two pools,” she says. “A 100-meter pool, almost meditative in its length, and another surrounded by olive trees and citrus groves in that soft golden Sicilian light.”

At the Four Seaons Anguilla, Huw Collins says, “The Sunset Lounge pool has never failed to deliver.”

Melanie Brandman, whose agency represents among the world’s prime inns and who has stayed at La Mamounia in Marrakech greater than 20 instances, cannot select between its two swimming pools—and would not need to. “The indoor pool is pure theatre, a masterclass in Moroccan craftsmanship. But it is the outside pool I am keen on. Vast, unhurried, made for morning laps in near-silence. Just birdsong, and 700-year-old olive timber.”

Bertha González Nieves not often skips the Beverly Hills Hotel, the place the Cabana Cafe’s al fresco lunch—McCarthy Salad, Casa Dragones Blanco on the rocks, and the well-known pink-and-green palette—constitutes one thing near ritual. “The pool transports you again in time to the times of previous Hollywood glamour,” she says. “I am unable to go to Los Angeles with out it.”

At Four Seasons Anguilla, Huw Collins, a founding father of The Wheat Company, finds one thing less complicated however no much less transporting. “The Sunset Lounge pool has by no means didn’t ship,” he says. Caribbean Sea ahead, palms above, and a sunset that never disappoints. “Necessary magic.”

The Zodiac Pool at Umaid Bhawan Palace in Jodhpur, India.

“Swimming has at all times felt like the center of summer season right here,” says Jade Snow, co-founder of Prospect Berkshires, a lakeside retreat tucked into the Massachusetts woods. “The pure setting does a lot of the work—the timber, the sunshine, the best way all of it connects to the lake. But we additionally let ourselves have enjoyable with it. Scalloped umbrellas, brilliant striped towels, loungers. Summer in the perfect, most basic sense.”

“Some pools are meant to help you better enjoy your surroundings,” says Adam Rathe, our senior options director. “Like the seaside saltwater stunner at Hotel Excelsior in Dubrovnik, which lets you look over the famous Old City—and across the Adriatic— while you splash around. Others help you escape them entirely, like the oasis in the back garden at the Park Hyatt in Saigon, where I recently recovered from a hot, humid day of sightseeing with a cool dip and a nap in the shade that left me feeling reinvigorated for a night out.”

The pool at Villa d’Este, on Lake Como.

And then there are swimming pools that cease you chilly. Architect David Rockwell has two that he returns to with out hesitation. At the Hotel Cipriani in Venice, the centerpiece pool affords full seclusion amid lush landscaping on the lagoon. “Its scale was famously a mistake,” he says. “British planners specified the pool in ft; the Italian builders understood meters. The ensuing scale makes you are feeling as in case you are floating within the sea itself.” At the Caruso in Ravello, his first cease on any journey to the Amalfi Coast, an infinity pool sits atop a cliff and seems to dissolve fully into the panorama under. Spencer Bailey, T&C contributing editor and author of Explore: Leading Hotels of the World, loves the underground pool on the Imperial Hotel Kyoto—”extra like swimming inside a cave than a resort spa,” he says, “a cavernous turquoise-tiled basin, huge Kitagi granite boulders alongside one aspect, moss-green tiles so darkish they seem nearly black. Just past the pool hangs a piece by Hiroshi Sugimoto. A real poetics of area.” And Scott Pask, the Tony Award-winning scenic designer, goes straight to the non-public pool within the villa at the Grace Hotel in Imerovigli, Santorini. “The view of the caldera and Skaros rock, that ever-present horizon line, the encircling structure transferring from white to gold to pink because the solar units. Heaven.”

For this author, the Hotel Bel-Air should be one of many nice pool scenes anyplace. Ringed with towering palms and framed by the Santa Monica foothills, it’s previous Hollywood glamour at its most unapologetic—nice folks watching, even higher eavesdropping, and the Nancy Reagan salad. The resort is legendary for its resident swans. The creatures draped throughout the loungers are a special breed altogether.