The so-called Riviera Maya may grab the headlines, but it’s worth venturing a little farther, to the southern reaches of the Yucatán Peninsula, for a truly transformative experience. Here, close to the border with Belize, is the town of Bacalar, along the shores of the impossibly clear blue lake of the same name; and it’s in this town that you’ll find the beautifully tranquil Casa Hormiga Hotel & Rituales.

The backstory seems too fantastic to be true, like something from a Roger Moore-era James Bond movie. Don Antenor Patino, the Bolivian tin magnate, plans a beachfront mega-resort, but doesn’t live to complete it — so his granddaughter Isabel Goldsmith (English financier father, long story) takes over. In the interest of preserving the land (and the dolphins) so dear to her, she revises her grandfather’s plan and erects a tiny, exclusive resort, where a maximum of 28 guests have at their disposal 1,500 acres of pristine beachfront land and close to 100 staff members.

From the very start, Grupo Habita has been synonymous with boutique hospitality in Mexico, setting the agenda with the original Habita in Mexico City and expanding into many of the country’s most inspiring destinations. La Paz, the capital city of Baja California Sur, two hours to the north of Los Cabos, is the setting for Baja Club, a 1910-vintage colonial-style villa that’s been renovated and expanded by architects Max von Werz Arquitectos and Jaune Architecture into a one-of-a-kind marriage of classic luxury and contemporary design.

Almost exactly halfway between Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo, on a spectacular coastline that’s dotted with hotels and resorts of every description, is Garza Blanca Los Cabos, a contemporary-style luxury resort with no fewer than 315 suites, 8 swimming pools, and six restaurants, depending on whether you count a beachside food truck or a swim-up taco bar as a restaurant (we’ll allow it).

While parts of Mexico are famously overdeveloped, the Pacific coastline of Oaxaca is not among them. This stretch of south-facing beach, spanning the villages of Mazunte and San Agustinillo, is spectacular, and the towns are in that sweet spot: lively but not crowded, off-the-radar but not impossible to reach. And while the beginnings of a luxury travel scene are present, they’re tasteful and restrained — a description that suits Zoa perfectly.

Yearning to get away from it all? Puerto Vallarta probably isn’t quite the first place you’ll think of. But then ther’s Xinalani, a gloriously secluded eco-resort wedged between the jungle and the water. Technically, it’s in Puerto Vallarta, but it’s actually twelve miles down the coast from the city proper, and only accessible by boat — which makes all the difference. Pick up what you need before boarding, and put an auto-responder on your e-mail: there’s no Starbucks near the hotel, nor a consistently reliable wi-fi connection — no television, no complimentary in-room iPad. The point of coming to Xinalani is to get away from all of that and enjoy the sand, sun, and sea. Well, it’s the bay, technically, the large, crystal-clear Banderas Bay on Mexico’s Pacific coast.

There are plenty of other hotels for the Puerto Vallarta spring-break experience. Hotel Mousai is strictly reserved for the 18-and-over set. So while we can’t guarantee perfect silence by the poolside, your odds of achieving the peace and tranquility you’re after are significantly higher here than they’d otherwise be.

Now that Tulum is well established as an international destination, its biggest worry is preventing the kind of over-polished overdevelopment that’s befallen so many other formerly well-kept secrets. A hotel like Encantada Tulum ought to put some of these fears to rest — this place is anything but over-polished.

Somewhere between glamorous excess and spartan backpackers’ minimalism is the Mayan Riviera town of Tulum. More concretely, it’s just down the coast from Playa del Carmen, on the less developed end of the Riviera Maya. And while the coastal hotel zone is where most of the hotels are — you’ve got to admire the clarity of that logic — the western edge of the town center, two miles inland from the beach, is where you’ll find the low-key, affordable, and charmingly mid-century modernist Hotel Tiki Tiki Tulum.

Not every hotel in Tulum is right on the beach, but Hotelito Azul is just about as close as you can get to the Caribbean and still wake up warm and dry. This is a destination whose fame has compounded year upon year, and the local hoteliers are struggling to keep up — here they’ve renovated a formerly undistinguished property, adding front-facing full-length glass doors to every room, in order to maximize the impact of the views. And while only the front row has that unobstructed vista, the effect in all of them is to bring the environment inside.

At the moment there may be no place in Mexico with quite as thrilling a reputation as that of Tulum, the Goldilocks of resort destinations — it’s wild but also a bit luxe, stylish but also authentic, spiritual but also grounded. No wonder the hotels sometimes struggle to live up to the myth. La Valise Tulum, however, makes it look easy. A beachfront villa and a handful of bungalows, with the jungle on one side and a spectacular white sand beach on the other, it’s a slice of heaven — and it’s packed with the modern comforts, traditional crafts, and eclectic, bohemian design that Tulum is supposed to be all about.

There’s not much in the way of concept to separate one of Tulum’s beachfront boutique hotels from any of the others — you can pretty much count on a laid-back, indoor-outdoor vibe, a sort of rustic-minimalist approach to design, and a wealth of arts and crafts by local makers. The differences come down to execution, and Nest Tulum is earning a following by getting all the details just right.

Take everything that annoys you about mass tourism on the Mexican coasts and put it out of your mind. Whatever your mental image, Playa Viva is more or less the opposite of that. A mere 12 casitas, for starters, is about as far as it gets from mass tourism in the first place. And this location, on protected land a half hour outside of Zihuatanejo, has a long, long way to go before it could be considered developed, much less overdeveloped.

A boutique hotel doesn’t have to be a design hotel, in the modern or contemporary sense — any hotel that’s modestly sized, memorable, and presents a unique point of view on its setting qualifies as a boutique hotel, in our book. Puerto Vallarta’s BellView Boutique Hotel fits the bill, even though its style is antique from top to bottom.

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