Blancaneaux Lodge

Backpackers trekking through the jungle highlands of Belize a few years ago occasionally stumbled onto a rustic place called Blancaneaux Lodge - then a row of thatched huts above an idyllic valley, where waterfalls drop into granite pools lined with tiger ferns while parrots roost in the palmettos. Francis Ford Coppola himself stumbled upon this same enchanted retreat in the Mountain Pine Ridge reserve in 1981. "I'd been looking for some kind of tropical utopia," Coppola says. "This was the paradise hideaway I was looking for." The rest is history... Welcome to Blancaneaux Lodge.