Acapulco: The Houses Built Above the Bay

At seven the light goes off the water and onto the hillside, and the whole eastern ridge of Acapulco turns the colour of the houses built into it. From a terrace up there the bay is a single curve from the headland on the left round to the city on the right, with the boats crossing it and the lights starting underneath you. Acapulco is a bay that is best looked at from above, which is why the houses were built where they were.

This is a city with a particular architecture of its own, and it is not a beach-strip architecture. The houses here are hillside houses: terraced down a slope, with reception rooms on one level, pools on another and bedrooms set apart, so the house can hold a party.

Where the houses are

Las Brisas is the residential ridge on the eastern side of the bay, where the older houses look back across the water at the whole shoreline. Brisas Guitarrón sits out on a rocky peninsula beyond it. Acapulco Diamante is the newer corridor running southeast along the coast.

Our five houses are all on that eastern side, and all of them are looking at the same view from slightly different heights.

The scale is the point

If your group is large, this coast has the houses for it.

Villa Sabalo has thirteen bedrooms and sleeps twenty-six. It is built in terraces down the slope, which keeps the bedrooms private from one another and gives almost every room the bay. Six of the bedrooms are king. Outside there is a forty-metre infinity pool over the water, a hot tub, outdoor lounges arranged for the sunset, dining with a barbecue, and a paddle-tennis court.

The layout is the interesting part. The reception rooms, the pool terrace and the discotheque sit apart from the sleeping wings — so an evening that runs late downstairs leaves the bedrooms undisturbed. That is a house designed by somebody who had thought about what twenty-six people actually do.

Casa Garbi is the other large one: eleven bedrooms for twenty-two, high on the ridge with the whole sweep of the bay below. Every bedroom has its own bathroom and air conditioning and ten of them face the sea. There are two living rooms on the first storey — one indoor and formal, one outdoor beside it — an infinity pool with a jacuzzi over the bay, a second pool in the garden, three palapa areas and a paddle court.

For a group in the middle, Casa Cielito Lindo takes sixteen in six bedrooms at Marina Brisas, with an infinity pool over the bay and terraces around it. Casa Luna sleeps twelve and Villa Lina fourteen, both in Las Brisas, both with the pool and the terraces facing the water.

About the cooking

The chef comes with the house, and at these sizes that is the whole point. At Villa Sabalo a house manager runs the property with private chefs and kitchen assistants, waitstaff, housekeepers and gardeners. Casa Garbi's resident team is a chef, a waiter, a maid and a gardener, which is enough to run the house without it feeling staffed. At Casa Luna a private chef cooks local and international dishes to whatever the group has agreed for the day, and at Villa Lina the chef cooks dinner to what the group decided that morning. At Casa Cielito Lindo a cook can be arranged at extra cost, to shop and cook through the stay. The groceries are bought for you and paid separately, and the advisor will set out how that works for your dates. Villa Sabalo's service quarters also take up to twenty-two travelling staff, so a group arriving with their own people is straightforward here.

Out of the house

The day to start with is the four-hour drive around the city: the Chapel of Peace, a run along Las Brisas and the main avenue, finishing at the cliff divers at La Quebrada. It is 4.9 from 22 reviews on GetYourGuide. The divers are the thing everyone has seen a photograph of, and they are better in person at dusk than the photograph suggests.

Otherwise the bay is the day. A private ecological beach is five minutes from Villa Sabalo, La Concha Beach Club ten, the city centre fifteen, golf and shopping within twenty.

Getting there

The airport is twenty-five minutes from the houses. For a group of twenty-plus arriving on different flights, that short transfer does more for the first day than almost anything else.

When to come

It is a year-round stay, and we do not write any month off. Tell the advisor your dates and what the week is for, and you will get a straight answer about that week.

Who it suits

A big group with an occasion — a landmark birthday, a family that travels together every year, a wedding party that wants one address. The houses were built for exactly that, and the largest holds twenty-six people without anyone sleeping in a study.

It suits you less if you want a small, quiet house on the sand. That is not what Acapulco's hillside does, and the Pacific coasts further south do it better.