Casa Malca

Casa Malca is the Tulum hotel built on the most unlikely backstory — the 1992 beach mansion that belonged to Pablo Escobar, abandoned after his death in 1993, bought by the Colombian-American art dealer Lio Malca in 2012, and reopened as a forty-two-room contemporary-art hotel in 2015. The collection on the walls is serious — Haring, Scharf, Basquiat, the curtain installations made of vintage wedding dresses — and the property is genuinely a living gallery as much as a hotel.

For clients who want the Tulum that is not the Instagram beach club, this is the right room — quieter than Azulik, more private than Be Tulum, and the Philosophy beach restaurant is the best meal on the property. The location at the south end of the hotel zone keeps the crowds further away.

The Tulum hotel with the art collection.