Ubud, Bali

Bali has a coastline that the world already knows about, but Ubud is what makes the island irreducible. The spiritual and cultural heart of the island lies 25 kilometres inland, in the highland interior at roughly 300 metres elevation — cool enough to sleep under sheets, surrounded by rice paddies that descend in terraces down valley walls carved by rivers, blanketed in the kind of green that only comes from 200 days of rain per year. Ubud is the place that Bali's own people will tell you is the real Bali, and they are not wrong.

The Balinese Hindu cosmology is woven into the physical fabric of daily life here in a way that has no parallel elsewhere in the Hindu world. Every morning, women set out canang sari — small woven palm-leaf offerings containing flowers, incense, and rice — on doorsteps, at shop entrances, at temple gates, at the base of trees. Smoke from a thousand sticks of incense moves through the air constantly. Temple ceremonies happen every few days in any given village; on full moon nights, the roads fill with women in bright sarongs carrying towers of fruit and flower on their heads. The gods are assumed to be present, and the offerings are genuine hospitality.

The Tegalalang rice terraces, 10 kilometres north of the town, are among the most photographed landscapes in Asia — a landscape of cascading emerald paddies shaped by the subak irrigation system that UNESCO recognised as a Cultural Landscape of Bali in 2012. Go early; by 9am the tour buses have arrived. The system is still working agriculture, not a theme park, and the farmers who maintain it deserve that recognition.

Tirta Empul holy spring temple is one of the most significant in Bali — pilgrims travel from across the island to bathe in the sacred spring pools, moving through a sequence of 30 purification fountains in an act of spiritual cleansing. Visiting respectfully, in sarong and sash, during a less busy weekday morning, is a genuinely moving experience. The spring has been sacred since at least 960 CE.

The arts are inseparable from Ubud's identity. The town has been an artists' colony since the 1930s, when the Dutch painter Rudolf Bonnet and the German Walter Spies settled here and encouraged Balinese painters to develop their own visual tradition. The Agung Rai Museum of Art and the Neka Art Museum collect and display works from that tradition and its descendants. Artisan village clusters surround the town: Celuk for silver and gold jewellery, Mas for woodcarving, Batuan for painting, Sukawati for shadow puppets and textiles. The craft quality is genuinely high — these are not tourist trinkets.

The Four Seasons Resort Bali at Sayan may be the single most architecturally audacious hotel in Asia. The main structure sits atop a hill above the Ayung River gorge — guests descend by a lotus-pond bridge to a floating elliptical lobby suspended above the jungle canopy, and the river villas below sit directly at river level with views of the gorge and the surrounding rice terraces. It has been named among the world's best hotels consistently since it opened, and the design has never been surpassed. Komaneka at Bisma, a smaller property on the cliff edge with private pool villas overlooking the valley, offers an equivalent level of intimacy at lower rates.

Locavore, on Dewi Sita Street in central Ubud, has been named Indonesia's best restaurant for multiple consecutive years and holds a consistent position in Asia's 50 Best. Chefs Ray Adriansyah and Eelke Plasmeijer built the menu entirely around Indonesian ingredients — fermented, foraged, cured, and smoked with techniques that sit between European precision and Southeast Asian instinct. The result is food that is unmistakably from this island, prepared with the kind of care that makes you reconsider every assumption about what Indonesian cuisine can be.

As the yoga retreat capital of Asia, Ubud has accumulated a density of shala studios, teachers, and retreat programmes that means virtually any tradition and level is served here. The Yoga Barn is the largest and most established centre — classes from 6am, multiple styles, drop-in welcome. COMO Shambhala Estate is for guests who want a residential wellness retreat of genuine medical seriousness: personalised programmes, Ayurvedic consultations, dedicated practitioners. The broader wellness economy here extends to Balinese traditional healing (Balian) — a form of spiritual medicine practised by trained healers that sits somewhere between herbalism, prayer, and psychotherapy, and which is taken entirely seriously by the Balinese people who seek it.