Playa Viva

Playa Viva sits on a mile of private beach outside the small town of Juluchuca, on Mexico's Pacific coast, about 35 minutes south of Zihuatanejo/Ixtapa International Airport. The property covers almost 200 acres, where the Sierra Madre foothills, coastal mangroves and the ocean meet. Its bamboo treehouses and casitas run entirely on solar power, and every one of its twelve room types faces the sea.

The founders, Sandra Kahn and David Leventhal, had run the bed and breakfast Casa Viva in Troncones when they were introduced to the land in 2005. One option was to carve it into lots and sell them. They rejected it as a failure of vision. Kahn went instead to the Greenbuild Conference in Atlanta and interviewed sustainable-development experts, among them Bill Reed of Regenesis Group, who spoke of moving beyond green and beyond sustainable toward regeneration, making a place better. Two design charrettes, in 2006 and 2007, produced a master plan and a set of Core Principles. The hotel opened in 2008.

The planning included a "history of place." Ayrie Cunliffe of the Regenesis team noticed that hills in the upper part of the property had contours at regular intervals, and that two of them sat in perfect north-south alignment. She hypothesized they were shaped by people, in keeping with the agricultural calendar. An archaeologist from a Mexican Department of Archeology and History, invited during permitting, found that the site had been a small but important community called Xolochiuhyan, estimated at about 500 people. The name, from which Juluchuca derives, has been read as "place to grow old," "place of the ancient ones" and "place of the gourd."

Today a 20-acre permaculture farm feeds a kitchen that cooks what it calls healthy Mexican food, and a turtle sanctuary operates on the beach. Yoga is held every morning on oceanside shalas, two of which hold up to 60 mats. Workshops and retreats in yoga, breathwork, cacao, aerial fitness and cooking fill the calendar. Most of the team come from Juluchuca, Rancho Nuevo and the villages up the watershed, and the property describes itself as woman-run.