Hotels & resorts

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.

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 ₫.