The desert is a landscape in constant transformation. Shaped by the wind, its dunes, ridges, and fissures emerge and fade in an ever-shifting expanse, as if the scenery itself were alive. It is a land of stark contrasts, where the scorching heat of the day gives way to the crisp coolness of the night, revealing nature in its most primal form. In such a dynamic and untamed environment, how can architecture not only integrate but also respect and engage with its surroundings? This is the challenge faced by hotels built within Latin America’s vast desert landscapes.
Defined by their extreme aridity and minimal rainfall, deserts are often seen as harsh and inhospitable. While they are most commonly associated with Africa and Asia, they exist on every continent, each with unique characteristics. In Latin America, two of the most striking examples are the Atacama Desert and the Sonoran Desert. Spanning over 100,000 km², the Atacama stretches across Chile and parts of Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru and is recognized as the driest desert in the world. The Sonoran Desert, covering around 222,000 km², extends from the southwestern United States into northwestern Mexico, its landscape defined by dramatic rock formations and towering cacti.
Despite their extreme conditions, deserts have long been home to civilizations that have adapted with ingenuity and resilience. The Indigenous Atacameños, for example, build their homes from adobe, a material that stabilizes indoor temperatures despite the desert’s dramatic thermal shifts. Similarly, the Tuareg nomads of the Sahara use lightweight fabric and animal-hide tents that provide both shade and ventilation. Across cultures, desert architecture is shaped by necessity, employing local materials and intelligent design to ensure comfort and survival in one of the most demanding environments on Earth.
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Architectural Interventions in the Desert: Natural Escapes, Minimal Intervention and Reclusive Luxury
Today, the fascination with desert landscapes continues to grow, fueling a rise in tourism. In regions like the United Arab Emirates, luxury desert resorts echo the aesthetic of traditional nomadic camps while offering state-of-the-art technology and lavish interiors. In contrast, Latin America’s desert hotels embrace a more understated approach. Rather than bold, extravagant designs, they focus on subtle integration with the landscape, using earthy tones and materials like adobe to create a sense of harmony with their surroundings. Through careful attention to scale and proportion, these spaces foster a deeper connection with the desert, offering a refined yet immersive experience of its vastness.
Continue reading to discover five remarkable hotels and lodges set within the deserts of Latin America.
Paradero Hotel / Yashar Yektajo + Rubén Valdez
Todos Santos, Mexico
Paradero Hotel seeks to capture the dynamic essence of the desert, translating its natural movement into a fluid and immersive architectural design. Free from rigid lines or imposing structures, its forms appear sculpted by the wind itself, creating a seamless harmony with the landscape. Organic volumes blend with the winding paths that weave through the property, framed by native vegetation and the soft expanse of desert sand.
Hotel Explora en Atacama / Germán del Sol
Hotel Explora is centered around an elevated plaza, offering both privacy and breathtaking views. Its common areas, positioned four meters above the ground, provide an uninterrupted panorama of the vast Atacama landscape. The design preserves the essence of local architecture, emphasizing solid walls, lightweight roofs, small openings, and luminous shadows—capturing the spirit of a culture that thrives on simplicity and ingenuity.
Hornitos Hotel / Gonzalo Mardones Viviani
Antofagasta, Chile
The primary goal of Hornitos Hotel was to intervene as minimally as possible. To achieve this, the architectural design follows a semi-buried, predominantly horizontal layout. A larger volume houses the main hotel, while smaller cabin-like structures are scattered across the terrain, blending seamlessly into the vast desert landscape. All structures are made of exposed reinforced concrete, pigmented in desert tones to enhance their natural integration with the surroundings.
Hotel Tierra Atacama / Matias Gonzalez + Rodrigo Searle
The Tierra Atacama Hotel was built using a lightweight construction system, minimizing the use of materials such as aggregates, cement, and water. To address the challenges of building in a remote area, it incorporates stone and adobe walls, blending tradition with sustainability. Its architecture subtly frames the vast desert landscape, with pathways leading to open and enclosed courtyards, thoughtfully exploring the relationship between scale and time within the desert’s immensity.
Bed & Breakfast Santulan / Santos Bolívar
Valle de Guadalupe, Mexico
Composed of interconnected volumes linked by walkways that engage directly with nature, Santulan invites guests to experience both spiritual and architectural harmony. The project embraces eco-friendly construction techniques, featuring BTC (compressed earth block) walls, a greywater recycling system, and green roofs planted with low-maintenance native vegetation.
This article is part of an ArchDaily curated series that focuses on built projects from our own database grouped under specific themes related to cities, typologies, materials, or programs. Every month, we will highlight a collection of structures that find a common thread between previously uncommon contexts, unpacking the depths of influence on our built environments. As always, at ArchDaily, we highly appreciate the input of our readers. If you think we should mention specific ideas, please submit your suggestions.
