Hotel Casa Santo Origen

Set where the northern suburbs meet the foothills of the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca mountains, at a comfortable remove from Oaxaca City’s busy center, Hotel Casa Santo Origen aims to create a sense of pleasantly secluded tranquility. It achieves this through a compound-like layout that emphasizes privacy, a location that’s fifteen crucial minutes’ drive from downtown traffic, and through warm and welcoming interiors that display colonial, indigenous, and contemporary influences in more or less equal measure.

The lessons of boutique hospitality are in evidence here: rooms feature warm, organic tones along with bold, focused color accents; modern furniture contrasts in a lively way with timbered ceilings and stone walls. Each of the eight suites is named for a different region of Oaxaca, and each has a soft transition between indoor and outdoor space; all have balconies or patios, and some of these have views down into Oaxaca City itself.

For a bit of a break from tradition, Entre Sombras, the restaurant, presents a uniquely Oaxacan take on clean, refreshing Mediterranean cuisine — this is one of Mexico’s most famous regions, from a culinary perspective, and the traditional local flavors are in plentiful supply everywhere else around town.