Stay

A long-let agent we used ourselves: he found us a modern, warm house — a rarity by local standards, because there is no heating in this town and most houses go cold in winter. Contact is over Zalo: you send the district, the budget and the term, and the answer comes back as a list with photos and map pins. The text runs through a translator, so no Vietnamese needed.

A long-let agent. Houses and flats in Da Lat barely appear on listing sites: the market runs on people, each with their own folder of addresses, and finding something decent without an intermediary is rare. It works like this: you send the district, the budget in dong and the term over Zalo, and back comes a list with photos and map pins to choose viewings from. The correspondence is in Vietnamese, but the text goes through a translator fine.

A long-let agent. Viewings here happen in person: several addresses are lined up and driven round in one go, so allow half a day and follow on your own bike. The request goes over Zalo — district, budget in dong, term — and the options come back with photos and map pins.

Works almost only with flats, and almost only furnished ones: his listings keep repeating «just bring a suitcase». One, two or three bedrooms, furniture in place, new buildings. Of the nine listings we went through, eight were flats and one a house. He works one district only — Lâm Viên, the old wards 8, 9 and 12: the north-east around the lake.

Handles whole houses rather than flats: all ten listings we went through were houses. A wide range, from 5m ₫ for a hundred-metre house with a basement to 30m for a four-level one. His listings spell out what most do not: plot and floor area separately, frontage and depth, the layout floor by floor. You can read the plan before viewing. Two districts — Lâm Viên and Cam Ly: the north-east around the lake and the west of the centre.

A contact recommended by a reader who looked for housing through him and was happy with it. The options came quickly, and so do his replies. He speaks fluent English. According to the reader he talks the small things through rather than giving one-word answers, and he is easy to deal with.

A 1932 building with its original French lift, sister hotel to the Palace across the road, at roughly half the price.

A resort right on the shore of Tuyen Lam: the blocks stand in pine forest with a footpath running down to the water. There are multi-bedroom villas with a kitchen and living room, taken by families or groups. Quiet, but every trip into town is 5 km of mountain road.

Panorama lets flats long-term, and there are a lot of them. It is round, with a full-height light well inside: the floors run in a ring, the flat doors open onto a circular balcony with a lattice rail, and the light falls from above. The layouts inside are unusual. The fit-out differs from flat to flat and you see it at once: some are done in black and white marble with gloss fronts, others are light, with timber panelling on walls and ceiling, an olive splashback in the kitchen and coloured upholstery. What they share: a kitchen with an induction hob, oven and extractor, built-in wardrobes to the ceiling, air conditioning, a wall-mounted television, and a separate bathroom with a glassed-in shower and a water heater. Three types are let — one bedroom, two bedrooms, and a larger two-bedroom; each has its own living room with a kitchen. The windows look over the town — Da Lat’s roofs and the hills behind them; some flats have a terrace along the window, some a balcony over the street.

One of the two long-stay rents we took straight from the owner rather than from a listing: a flat with two small bedrooms, two bathrooms and a balcony in a new building, 10M ₫ a month. The other measured rent is a whole house in old Ward 8 at 22M ₫.

A hotel and a park at once: a hundred hectares of pine forest at the foot of Nui Voi — Elephant Mountain — half an hour from Da Lat along the airport road. It is built not as a hotel with a garden but as a park with villas inside it: you are driven around in a buggy, and you can either stay the night or come for the day on a ticket. The themed zones are borrowed from other cultures and each sits on its own slope: a Japanese garden with a red torii gate, a house under a curved roof, clipped ball-shaped shrubs and beds of hydrangeas; a Chinese courtyard with a round moon gate in the wall, a pavilion under a hundred silk lanterns and carved wooden screens; a Korean hanok; a Central Highlands village with longhouses. In the middle is a lake with a fountain, a gilded seated Buddha on a platform in the middle of a white bridge, and above it, up the steps, a Zen monastery with an orange tiled roof and a white statue of Guanyin. Between the zones run stone paths, boardwalks along the stream and benches under bamboo and pines. The lodging is scattered over the hills: three-storey white villas with mansard roofs and flower names — Tulip, Mimosa, Lavender — on one slope, a row of container bungalows with wooden decks above the valley on another. The rooms are modern and expensively finished: backlit timber battens on the wall, a full-height window with two armchairs and a small table, a freestanding tub by a blinded window. The view over the pine hills is the main reason to come: in the rain the mist crawls along the ridges, and you see it just as well from the decks as from the room window.

Seventeen restored 1920s French villas along cobbled lanes in a pine valley — the most Da Lat thing you can book in this town. But you can come without checking in: the grounds have a heated open-air pool among very tall pines. It is small, yet there is room to actually swim rather than stand in the water. Next to it a spa with a sauna, scrubs, massage and rituals, plus a bar and a restaurant.

Villas in a pine forest above Tuyen Lam: the windows look out on the lake, the pines and the hills. The finish is modern and the villas carry no damp smell. A night with breakfast costs 1.5 to 1.8 million ₫.