Lima did not become the culinary capital of South America by accident, and Belmond Miraflores Park sits at the centre of the proof: an oceanfront tower in Miraflores, close enough to the cliffs that the Pacific is the view from nearly every room, and close enough to the city's defining restaurants that a reservation is rarely more than a short taxi away. The hotel itself runs on the same precision the city is known for — a rooftop pool heated against the coastal fog, a spa built for recovery between long lunches, service calibrated to a city that takes its food more seriously than its weather.

Maido was named the World's Best Restaurant at the 2025 World's 50 Best awards in Turin — Nikkei cuisine, Peruvian ingredients filtered through Japanese technique, a tasting menu that has become the reason some people fly to Lima at all. Central, a short distance away, builds its menu around Peru's altitude, working ingredients from sea level to four thousand metres into a single sitting. Both require booking weeks ahead; the hotel's concierge has the relationships to make that less of a gamble. Closer to home, the hotel's own dining room handles ceviche with the same seriousness the city does — no tourist-menu compromise, even for guests who never leave the building.

Frank Gehry's only hotel project sits inside a working winery in the village of Elciego — titanium ribbons in rose, gold, and silver erupting from the roofline of the Marqués de Riscal estate, the same architect responsible for the Guggenheim Bilbao turning his attention from a museum to a place to sleep. The winery itself predates the hotel by more than a century and a half; Gehry's building was conceived as a "City of Wine," an addition rather than a replacement, with the original bodega still producing immediately next door.

Chef Francis Paniego holds a Michelin star in the estate's restaurant, working Riojan tradition — slow-cooked lamb, market vegetables, the region's defining Tempranillo — into a tasting menu that treats the wine list as a co-author rather than an accompaniment. The Vinothérapie Spa by Caudalie runs treatments built around the antioxidant properties of crushed Cabernet grapes, a detail that sounds gimmicky until the wine barrel bath is actually in front of you. The restaurant's evening tasting menu runs an adults-only seating specifically — a detail worth knowing if the rest of the day has involved children, and one more reason this particular dinner feels like its own event.

Franschhoek has been called the gastronomic capital of Africa often enough that the description has stopped sounding like marketing — French Huguenot heritage, a valley of working wine estates, and a village high street with more serious kitchens per block than anywhere else in the country. Leeu House sits directly on that high street, a restored Cape Dutch guesthouse that welcomes guests eighteen and older only, its twelve suites arranged around a private garden and pool that make the centre of the village feel, somehow, like a hideaway.

A complimentary shuttle connects guests to La Petite Colombe at sister property Leeu Estates, run by the team behind La Colombe and counted among South Africa's most acclaimed tables — and to Épice and Protégé at Le Quartier Français, two more kitchens in the same collection, each with its own register. The Great Heart Wines boutique, a staff-owned project from Mullineux & Leeu Family Wines, runs private tastings for Leeu House guests specifically. The effect is a single adults-only base with access to four serious kitchens and a cellar's worth of Cape wine, none of it more than a short walk or a free shuttle ride away.