• Bute Inlet, British Columbia V0L 1W0, Canada

Michelle Pfeiffer and David E. Kelley spent a decade hiding from the Ally Mcbeal dancing-baby era in a timber lodge an hour's seaplane ride north of Vancouver, their nearest neighbors a population of grizzlies. French entrepreneur David Tuchbant bought the place in 2023, poured a reported $30 million into it and did something almost unheard of at this altitude of wealth: turned it nonprofit. Fawn Bluff opens for its first full season this summer as an exclusive buyout on 340 acres of Homalco First Nation territory, with its proceeds funding a recovery center for the community in Campbell River. Guests break through alpine ice in inflatable kayaks and eat fondue on a glacier from the pilot's 1930s pot. The way home is by boat.

• Ruth Glacier, Denali National Park and Preserve, Alaska, via Talkeetna 99676, USA

There is a five-acre rock poking out of the Ruth Glacier that the Sheldon family has owned since before Alaska was a state, which makes them the only private landholders inside 6 million acres of Denali National Park. The bush pilot Don Sheldon pioneered the art of landing planes on glaciers; his children finished the hexagonal chalet that bears his name in 2018. Getting there means a helicopter from Talkeetna and then a silence broken only by the occasional avalanche, with nothing built for 10 miles beyond the 1966 mountain hut a two-minute walk away. Nights belong to the aurora and a rooftop sauna. It is perhaps the most famous address on this list, and the hardest to fault.

• 8532 Road 38, Rico, Colorado 81332, USA

An 1880s silver-mining town went bust in the San Juan Mountains and sat abandoned until someone had the good sense to restore it, cabin by cabin, into a single luxury resort with a saloon still scarred by Butch Cassidy's carved signature. The last six miles are dirt, often snowbound, which keeps Dunton's dozen hand-hewn cabins about as far from a valet stand as Colorado gets. Hot springs steam in a converted 19th-century bathhouse. The river canyon handles the rest. For a ghost town, it throws a very good dinner.

• Monteverde, Puntarenas Province 60109, Costa Rica

The family behind Hotel Belmar has been practicing what the industry now calls regenerative hospitality on this Monteverde ridge for more than 40 years, back when the term was simply good farming. In June 2026, they unveiled Artista, 10 standalone villas pitched into the cloud forest with saltwater plunge pools, dedicated artist studios and construction framed in FSC-certified timber. Modular construction, passive cooling and rainwater harvesting keep the footprint light. Beyond the villas, suspension bridges and elevated trails cross the hotel's private reserve, while Finca Madre Tierra supplies the kitchen with produce, herbs and ingredients for the property's brewery and fermentation program.

• Islas Secas Archipelago, via San Lorenzo, Chiriquí Province 0452, Panama

Someone bought all 14 islands of this Pacific archipelago and then, in an act of restraint bordering on the eccentric, built on exactly one of them. The other 13 stay empty, 20 miles off Panama's coast, reached by a Twin Otter to a private airstrip or a speedboat through water where whale sharks pass in season. Seven casitas and a single villa host, at most, two dozen guests. A large solar installation supplies the resort's power without the drone of diesel generators. Food waste and wastewater are processed on-site. Guests arrive on the private airstrip or by speedboat, then disappear into a landscape with no neighboring hotel, beach club or pleasure craft circling for lunch reservations.

• Ruta Provincial 11, Kilometer 23, Z9405 El Calafate, Santa Cruz, Argentina

Eolo occupies a 10,000-acre Patagonian estancia with no neighboring building in sight, with Lago Argentino spread below in a sheet of silver. Its name comes from Aeolus, keeper of the winds, an apt reference in a landscape where the weather controls the mood. The former sheep station was rebuilt with 17 spare rooms, timber floors and deep-set windows that keep attention fixed outside. Guides take guests to the Perito Moreno Glacier by day. After dark, the wind works around the walls and across the steppe.

• Sonop Farm, Road D707, Hardap Region 22006, Namibia

Ten tents perch on a cluster of granite boulders above the oldest desert on earth, kitted out like a 1920s explorer's fever dream—Persian rugs, brass telescopes, a billiard room, a cigar lounge, all of it hauled up the rock rather than bolted into it. Zannier's Sonop is a marvel, and the Namib obliges with dunes that shift from apricot to blood-orange as the light drops. Access is by charter flight and then a climb. Sundowners happen on the boulders.

• Segera, Rumuruti Road, Nanyuki 10400, Laikipia, Kenya

Jochen Zeitz, the former Puma chief turned conservationist, converted 50,000 acres of the Laikipia plateau into a wildlife conservancy and then filled the villas with one of the most serious collections of contemporary African art on the continent. Rooms open onto the savanna, where giraffes graze at eye level from the veranda. Elephants wander past the botanical gardens. Yet Segera has zero interest in chasing the Big Five checklist the way the Mara camps do. It is subtler and stranger, more taken with sculpture and regeneration than with the morning game-drive scramble. A private airstrip handles arrivals.

• Nosy Ankao, Diana Region 207, Madagascar

Getting to Miavana requires two flights, an overnight in the Malagasy capital and, finally, a helicopter over baobabs and shipwrecks to an island most maps don't bother labeling. The payoff is 14 villas on Nosy Ankao, each one closer to a small compound than a hotel room, wrapped in a 37,000-acre marine reserve the property helped create. On land, the conservation team has replanted native forest and established a population of crowned lemurs moved from threatened habitat. Butlers appear when needed and recede just as quickly. Beyond the beach, the Indian Ocean runs uninterrupted toward the horizon.

• 570 Fljót, Ólafsfjörður, Iceland

A working sheep farm in a valley on Iceland's Troll Peninsula was gutted and reborn as a heli-skiing lodge with a geothermal pool built half indoors and half out, so swimmers can drift from a heated interior into the Arctic air and back. Eleven's Deplar Farm points itself at whatever the season offers, from powder descents off untracked peaks in winter to Atlantic salmon and surfable swell come summer, plus the northern lights whenever the sky cooperates. The turf roof nods to Viking building tradition, but everything under belongs to today.

• Below Gangtey Monastery, Phobjikha Valley, Wangdue Phodrang 16004, Bhutan

Each winter, several hundred black-necked cranes descend from the Tibetan Plateau into the Phobjikha Valley. Gangtey Lodge watches over their feeding grounds from the slope above, its floor-to-ceiling windows facing the broad glacial bowl. Reaching this part of Bhutan requires hours of switchbacks through forest and mountain passes, which keep the valley largely untouched. The rooms have wood-burning stoves and freestanding tubs positioned toward the view. Gangtey Monastery is a short walk uphill, while breakfast is served with butter tea on a veranda above one of the Himalayas’ last undeveloped valleys.

• Prey Praseth Village, Ou Bak Rothed Commune, Kampong Seila District, Preah Sihanouk Province 09101, Cambodia

Guests arrive at Shinta Mani Wild by clipping into a 1,300-foot zip line and flying over a waterfall into the middle of the Cardamom rainforest, which is either the most theatrical hotel check-in on earth or simply the fastest way in. Designer Bill Bensley strung 15 tented suites along a river gorge in a corridor of forest he leased specifically to keep loggers and poachers out of it. Tourism revenue helps fund rangers who patrol the surrounding forest, while the bar hangs above the rushing water. The adventure may be highly styled, but the conservation work beneath it is real.

• Banwa Private Island, Roxas, 5308 Palawan, Philippines

Banwa spent a stretch marketed as the most expensive resort on the planet, a claim that overshadowed its more persuasive distinction: only six villas occupy the entire island. Guests reach it by helicopter, seaplane or private boat across the Sulu Sea, then share a protected stretch of reef with little else on the horizon. The island can be booked in full or by individual villa. Diving, fishing and cave excursions fill the days, assuming the beach does not derail the schedule first. The water has the saturated blue normally associated with an aggressively edited photograph, except here, it survives inspection.

• Kaibu Island, Northern Lau, Fiji

The Northern Lau group remains one of Fiji’s least-visited regions, removed from the resort belt by distance and limited air access. Vatuvara operates from Kaibu Island, while neighboring Vatuvara Island remains undeveloped as a raised-limestone nature preserve. Three private residences share long beaches, a house reef and enough staff that requests are often anticipated before they are made. There are no day visitors and no neighboring resort. At full occupancy, six guests have the island largely to themselves, leaving the Pacific to set the pace.

• 1 Gibb River-Wyndham Road, Durack WA 6743, Australia

El Questro covers roughly 700,000 acres of the Kimberley, one of the emptiest and most visually severe landscapes in Australia. The 10-room Homestead occupies a small corner of it, set on a cliff above the Chamberlain River. At dusk, the rock walls beyond the pool turn copper before dropping into shadow. Days unfold through gorge swims, helicopter flights to remote waterholes and boat trips past freshwater crocodiles. Guests arrive by a long red-dirt drive from Kununurra or by charter flight, which avoids the corrugations but misses the gradual disappearance of everything familiar.