Above the Clouds

The highlands of Guatemala combine centuries-old culture, enchanting wildlife, and breathtaking natural beauty.

- By MARY LUSSIANA

Casa Palopo sits high up, on the steep banks of Lake Atitlán, in Guatemala's uplands. Once, it was a private home, but now its bold blue, red, and daffodil-yellow walls house a 16-room hotel. Each one is different, but all have a terrace that looks onto the misty blue lake and the three volcanoes that dominate its far shore.

Aldous Huxley described the lake perfectly in his 1934 travel book, Beyond the Mexique Bay: “Lake Como, it seems to me, touches on the limit of permissibly picturesque, but Atitlán is Como with the additional embellishments of several immense volcanoes. It really is too much of a good thing.” But that could be said of the whole of Guatemala; indeed, the travel writer Norman Lewis considered it the most beautiful country on Earth—“other countries, by contrast, are lacking in savour.”

From my vantage point that morning, sipping coffee in the quiet of sunrise on my terrace at Casa Palopo, while a ruby-throated hummingbird darted in and out of the hanging purple orchids, close enough that I could hear the thrum of its tiny, powerful wings, I was inclined to agree.

I was travelling with my younger son and we began our trip in the old capital, Antigua, less than an hour from Guatemala City. Our flight took us via Miami (offering a chance on the return leg to treat ourselves to a stay at the sleek Four Seasons Hotel at the Surf Club, a perfect contrast to the jungle we had left behind) and landed in the evening, heralding an atmospheric arrival in inky blackness into this 16th-century Spanish colonial town. Small chinks of light escaping from the shuttered single-storey houses and the occasional beam of the moon, as clouds parted, revealed cobbled streets and the silhouettes of church towers. Nothing hinted at the intensity of the colours that would greet us the following day.