Maestro Valley

The way in is on foot. From the town dock at San Marcos La Laguna, a gentle fifteen-minute walk leads into a valley on Lake Atitlán, where Maestro Valley Sanctuary sits among trails, with the lake and volcanoes around it. Most guests fly into Guatemala City and take a shuttle of about three hours. The property runs entirely on solar power.

The sanctuary is co-created by two communities. Bioculture Retreats is rooted in primal living, ancestral nutrition and movement. Holistic University Retreats is an educational path through sound healing, ceremony, conscious living and community building. Key Reteff, who founded Holistic University, lives on the property. He is a healthcare practitioner from Halifax, Canada, whose years of study in India and Mexico followed a back injury sustained in the Canadian Army. Christian Van Camp, Dakota Mays and Sedona Holzinger, co-owners and co-founders from the Bioculture side, complete the team.

The centrepiece is an aircrete sound dome, which the sanctuary describes as the world's largest, used for ceremony, music, movement and workshops. Around it are a wood-fired temazcal and sauna, dark rooms for sensory retreat, an outdoor calisthenics gym with free weights, sun decks, a permaculture food forest and an organic kitchen that cooks without seed oils.

Guests sleep in three private cabins, two pyramid homes, an open-air loft, and bunk rooms for four and for eight. Rooms use cotton bedding, red and incandescent lighting and beeswax candles, with filtered water at every tap and the Wi-Fi switched off overnight. Groups of up to 23 can host their own retreats with an on-site team, while the in-house retreats follow a daily rhythm of sound ceremony, temazcal, movement, shared meals and workshops. A residency program offers longer stays.