Ancient Healing at One&Only Mandarina

There are places you travel to for rest. And there are places you travel to for transformation. One&Only Mandarina, perched on the emerald cliffs of Mexico’s Riviera Nayarit, belongs firmly in the second category. Set within one of the most awe-inspiring coastal rainforests in the country, roughly 45 minutes north of Puerto Vallarta along a newly built coastal highway, this resort announces its intentions from the very first moment. Something is about to happen to you.

Upon arrival at your villa – whether a clifftop retreat or a jungle treehouse suspended between the canopy and the sea – the team performs a purification ritual. Herbs are burned to cleanse the energies of the space, to prepare it, and to prepare you. What follows will not be a sequence of booked treatments. It will be a journey, and you are already on it.

The Architecture of the Sacred

The spa at One&Only Mandarina is unlike any other luxury wellness facility in the world, and the difference begins with its physical form. Six secluded treatment rooms are set into a natural volcanic rock garden, each one cocooned beneath the jungle canopy. Skylights reveal the living ceiling above – branches, light, movement, sky. At the heart of the garden stands a large and ancient Higuera tree, and every element of the spa – the mud therapy grotto, the vitality pool, the relaxation garden – has been consciously positioned around its roots, as if the tree were the true architect and the structures merely its guests.

But the deeper logic of the space is cosmological. The spa’s layout follows the form of an eight-pointed star, a sacred geometry created in collaboration with the Huichol people – one of the very few indigenous communities in Mexico to have remained largely untouched by Spanish colonial influence, and a people whose spiritual tradition is woven into the living identity of Riviera Nayarit. In the Huichol cosmovision, the eight-pointed star represents rebirth, renewal, and spiritual regeneration. The design overlaps two squares to create a duality that maps the four classical elements onto the four cardinal directions of the spa: fire points toward the Temazcal, water toward the wet therapy areas, air toward the treatment rooms, earth toward the entrance.

To walk through this space is to move through an ancient symbolic order – whether or not you are aware of it. That, precisely, is the point. The healing begins in the structure itself.

The Spiritual Facilitator

What distinguishes One&Only Mandarina’s approach to wellness most radically from the luxury spa mainstream is the intelligence that organises the whole experience: a dedicated spiritual facilitator whose role is not to sell you a programme, but to understand you.

Upon arrival, guests meet a practitioner whose work begins with an assessment of your current emotional, physical, and psychic state. From that conversation, a wellness journey is designed composed around what you need at this specific moment in your life.

What follows is a network of practitioners and modalities. Tarot and oracle ceremonies. Astrological readings and quantum frequency healing. Sacred chanting and intuitive dance. Pranayama and breathwork sessions. Therapists working with ancient Toltec wisdom, connecting with your energies through traditions that predate the resort, predate the highway, predate the country itself. The programmes can unfold across multiple days to the pace at which transformation actually moves.

This is, in every meaningful sense, the most ambitious wellness offering in Mexico.

The Temazcal: A Thousand Years of Fire and Steam

Of all the ceremonies and rituals available at One&Only Spa, the Temazcal stands apart as the most elemental, the most ancient, and – for many guests – the most affecting.

The Temazcal is a pre-Hispanic steam ceremony rooted in Mesoamerican civilisations and practised, in one form or another, for over a thousand years. It is a spiritual practice, a ritual of purification for both body and mind, traditionally performed and guided by a shaman or curandera. At One&Only Mandarina, it is offered as the real thing.

The structure of the Temazcal is itself a form of teaching. It is circular, set into the earth, heated by volcanic rocks gathered locally, with its entrance oriented toward the east to greet the sunrise. Its design intentionally re-creates the womb space – small, dark, warm, intensely humid, and deeply humbling. The entranceway is built low to the ground. To enter, you must bow your head. This is not incidental. It is the first instruction.

Inside, the ceremony unfolds through heat, medicinal herbs, copal incense, and indigenous music. The curandera guides the process, holding the space and the participants through what can be an intense and disorienting experience – one that strips away the surface layers of the self with remarkable efficiency. Those who emerge describe something that is difficult to put into words: a lightness, a clarity, a sense of renewal that they had not expected to find in the jungle. Many describe it as the most significant hour they have spent in years.

Curanderismo: The Living Art of Mexican Healing

Alongside the Temazcal, One&Only Spa invites guests into direct contact with Curanderismo – the ancient Mexican tradition of folk healing that has been practised across Mesoamerica for millennia and that remains, in the hands of skilled curanderas, one of the most powerful healing modalities available anywhere.

The experience offered here is the Limpia, or Spiritual Cleansing. Within fragrant clouds of copal incense, the curandera uses a fresh herbal bouquet to move across the entire body, physically and energetically sweeping away negative accumulations while chanting in a voice that seems to belong to a time before language was written down. The intention is restoration – to return the body to its natural state of wholeness and energetic coherence.

In a global wellness market saturated with offerings that have been carefully calibrated to the comfort levels of the luxury traveller, the Limpia is something different. It is a living tradition, offered without dilution, without apology, and without the softening that so often strips indigenous practices of their actual potency when they enter the five-star context. Here, the tradition is respected enough to be presented as it is.

Breathwork, Sound and the Sensorial Journey

For guests approaching these practices for the first time, the experience can be quietly revelatory. On the spa’s open-air pavilion, sessions explore the alchemy of breath through pranayama and guided meditation. Chakra cleansing aromatherapy fills the warm air. Singing bowls are sounded and held, their overtones moving through the body in ways that conventional reason struggles to account for. Spiritual facilitators lead introspective meditations, drawing the guest toward an imagined encounter with their own future self.

The quality of presence here is worth remarking on. The practitioners at One&Only Mandarina are not aestheticians working from a wellness script. They are, many of them, people who have spent decades in these traditions – guides who understand the difference between performing a ceremony and actually holding one. The guest feels this difference, even if they cannot name it.

The spa also maintains a partnership with Tata Harper, the pioneering all-natural luxury skincare brand, offering Sensorial Resets – a curated collection of treatments using only the purest botanical extracts, in what is reportedly an exclusive global spa collaboration. The result is a layering of indigenous wisdom and contemporary clean beauty that never feels contradictory. In this setting, the ancient and the modern are not at odds. They are, quite simply, in conversation.

The Garden Around It All

Beyond the ceremony and the ritual, the spa grounds themselves are designed for a more gradual form of restoration. The full hydrotherapy circuit – cold plunge pools, a steam room and sauna with unobstructed jungle views, a mud grotto, and a vitality pool – frames a journey through temperature and sensation that has its own quiet logic. The volcanic rock garden holds everything in a silence that feels earned rather than engineered.

On the outdoor Aura Deck, surrounded by the living sounds of the rainforest, guests choose from nine different yoga classes led by professional instructors, as well as sound therapy sessions and breathwork classes available across the length of a stay. For those who prefer to move in privacy, in-villa fitness kits – resistance bands, yoga mats, portable gyms – are delivered on request.

None of this is supplementary. The fitness studio, the yoga deck, the hydrotherapy circuit – they are not amenities added to a luxury hotel that happens to have a spa. They are part of a coherent philosophy: that genuine wellbeing requires time, layering, and the willingness to let the environment work on you at its own pace.

On the Matter of Staying

The accommodations at One&Only Mandarina – clifftop villas and jungle treehouses, each with a private pool and views that shift between Pacific horizon and jungle canopy depending on the hour – dissolve the boundary between interior and landscape in a way that few resorts achieve. The feeling of sleeping within the forest rather than beside it is not metaphorical. It is structural.

The recommended minimum stay is four to five nights. Mandarina is one of those rare destinations where the depth of the experience increases non-linearly with the length of the stay. Arrive on day one; by day four, you will feel as though you have been here for weeks, and that will not feel like too long.

What it is, above all, is a place where the jungle works on you. The spa at its heart, sited on volcanic rock, structured by indigenous sacred geometry, animated by traditions , ensures that when you finally leave, you carry that experience with you.