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This Old HaciendaEstate hotels in Ecuador and beyond offer a little history with your morning coffee. I’m poking around the crumbling stone chapel and Incan ruins at Hacienda San Agustín de Callo, in the Andean highlands near the border of Colombia. Walking through this layer cake of history, the earth seems to aspire to reclaim the vestiges of Ecuador’s past. The buildings at San Agustín are in various states of repair as the third-generation owner, Mignon Plaza, restores them one by one and adds them to her roster of 15 suites. They’re not as sophisticated as, say, the newly gentrified hotels in Quito, but they’re definitely more authentic. Not since the 1960s, when maharaja palaces were all the rage in India, has the house hotel been so popular. In Portugal, Pestana Hotels & Resorts, which manages the country’s restored pousadas – 18th-century mansions, castles and convents turned hotels – recently created a “pousada passport,” a kind of pub crawl for the jet set. Or take the centuries-old ryokans of Japan, where 30 of these rural monk-run free-houses now make up the design-conscious Ryokan Collection. To wit: The six-room Ochiairou Murakami has private outdoor hot spring plunge pools.
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