Spice Tree Munnar

SpiceTree keeps its numbers small: fourteen suites and two individual pool villas, set on the Muttukadu and Kumbappara hills between the Kannan Devan range and Bison Valley. Every room is angled at the mountains, forest and valley, and the valley obliges.

Copper tubs in the clouds

Bathing is the house obsession. The Classic Cottages — colonial in style, built with hand-chiselled granite — each hide a Victorian jacuzzi with a valley view in what the resort calls the 'recharge room'. The Honeymoon Suite goes further: a handcrafted copper tub offering milk-and-rose or wine-and-milk bath infusions, a four-poster king bed, and a private plunge pool on the garden patio facing the sunset over Chokkanmudi Peak. The Pool Villas top the lot with solar-heated infinity pools.

A hill station where the bath has the best seat.

Between soaks there is a tea lounge named 300 BC, the Bliss mountain spa, a library with its own plunge pool, and excursions from the Kolukkumalai estates to an evening trek to the dolmens. The sustainability ledger sits on the homepage rather than in a brochure: 68,009 trees planted to date, with 100,000 promised by 2027, and a stated plan to lift solar power to 60 per cent of the resort's electricity.