Blancaneaux Lodge

Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola found Blancaneaux abandoned in the early 1980s, not long after finishing Apocalypse Now in the Philippines. He jumped into the waterfall on the property, decided it was somewhere he could write, and kept it as a private family retreat for over a decade before opening it to guests in 1993. Today 20 stilted cabanas and villas, thatched and furnished with pieces the Coppolas collected across Mexico and Guatemala, perch along the Privassion River in the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, where waterfalls drop into glass-clear pools. The lodge still runs on its own hydroelectric plant, which supplies most of the electricity and heats the pools. There's no air-conditioning anywhere, but one of the bar's ceiling fans is a prop salvaged from Apocalypse Now's opening scene.

The organic garden supplies both restaurants. Montagna, an Italian kitchen which draws on the Coppola family's roots in Basilicata, and the poolside Guatemaltecqua. Twice a week guests can join a communal dinner cooked entirely from whatever was picked that day. Horses from the on-site stables head out to Big Rock Falls, and further afield are the Maya ruins at Caracol and the ATM Cave, named one of the world's ten most sacred caves by National Geographic.