Hotel Atitlan

About Hotel Atitlan

Hotel Atitlan is a 61-room Hotel and Botanical Garden. The Hotel is located at the northern edge of Lake Atitlan on Finca San Buenaventura, near Panajachel in the Guatemalan highlands. It has a full-service restaurant and bar offering international cuisine prepared from fresh produce purchased in local markets. The Hotel design is patterned after Spanish-Colonial haciendas favored by Guatemala plantation owners in the 18th Century. It is accented by hand-crafted furniture and hand-woven fabrics. The Hotel was built over a 21-year period by skilled, local laborers and craftsmen. The garden is a collection of different gardens, each with their own identity. They are broadly divided into luscious tropical gardens, formal rose gardens and a mixture of Hibiscus, Heliconias, Passion Flower and Bouganvillia. The garden has more than 500 different species representing 250 plant families.

Hotel Atitlan faces a natural wonder of blue, wind-tossed waters set against a backdrop of three 10,000-foot volcanoes - Toliman, Atitlan and San Pedro. Hotel Atitlan offers easy access to villages surrounding the lake and to Chichicastenango, the home of one of the largest and most colorful native markets in Central America. The lake is volcanic in origin, formed in an eruption 84,000 years ago. The forests surrounding the lake are an important habitat for numerous, exotic tropical birds. The lake surroundings also support vast plantations, with communities harvesting a variety of produce. It is renowned as one of the most beautiful lakes in the world, as Aldous Huxley famously wrote of it: "Lake Como, it seems to me, touches on the limit of permissibly picturesque, but Atitli??n is Como with additional embellishments of several immense volcanoes. It really is too much of a good thing."