Escaping to Mexico’s Best-Kept-Secret Island

The island of Holbox, off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, is that rare find: an under-the-radar getaway with good food, good hotels and—for now—no scene

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Coconut shrimp at Rosa Mexicano Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

Beachgoers relax on hammocks in Isla Holbox, Mexico. Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

Dusk at Mandarina restaurant and beach club. Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

The view of the beach from Mandarina Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

Tourists kayak at Río Kuka in Isla Holbox. Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

A beachfront room at Casa Las Tortugas hotel. Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

A woman reads in a hammock at Mandarina beach club. Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

The pink exterior of La Isla del Colibri restaurant Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

Inside the eclectic La Isla del Colibri restaurant Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

A man walks along a dock during the sunset. Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

Dinner at Viva Zapata restaurant and bar Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

Margarita Zapata made with pineapple, serrano chile, and mezcal at Viva Zapata restaurant and bar. Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

An array of food on the grill at Viva Zapata Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

Rosa Mexicano restaurant Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

Chilaquiles Rojos at La Isla del Colibri restaurant Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

Coconut shrimp at Rosa Mexicano Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

Beachgoers relax on hammocks in Isla Holbox, Mexico. Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

Kate Maxwell

Updated March 24, 2016 10:01 p.m. ET

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WE’D PLANNED TO spend a week on the beach in Tulum over New Year’s, but Tulum had other ideas. Since my first visit to the Mexican beach town almost two decades ago, when my friends and I slept in hammocks in electricity-less palapas and had the 13th-century Mayan ruins all to ourselves, Tulum has evolved from backpacker haven to wintering spot du jour for the international Instagrammer set. New Year’s is its peak season, and every hotel I tried was either full or demanding over $500 for a room that looked suspiciously like that hammock-under-a-palapa I’d paid $5 a night for 18 years ago.

If you want to think outside of the Holbox, these stretches of sand are generally mob-free, too

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Four More Under-the-Radar Beaches

In search of an alternative, I zoomed out on Google Maps and spotted a slip of an island called Holbox just north of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, where the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea meet. Online, at least, it looked like the Tulum I remembered from that post-college trip, minus the ruins: white beaches, Kool-Aid-colored ocean, coconut palms and not much else. A friend who’d taken her three children to Isla Holbox the previous winter reported that it is a “charming little island with a great vibe.” We were sold.
I booked a week for myself, my husband and our 1-year-old daughter at Casa Las Tortugas, a collection of thatched-roof bungalows the colors of Mexico blanket stripes that were scattered along the beach and around a petite swimming pool. It includes a yoga studio, restaurant and the requisite hammocks slung between palm trees—all for less than half the going nightly rate in Tulum.

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A beachfront room at Casa Las Tortugas Photo: Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

During the 25-minute ferry crossing from the tiny port of Chiquilá on the Yucatán Peninsula’s north coast (a two-and-a-half-hour taxi ride from Cancún), we had our first taste of what was to come. A plaid-shirted mariachi player took his place at the front of the crowded boat and strummed enthusiastically as a long strip of green land flickered into view. My daughter, who jiggles like a dancing Coke can whenever she hears music, was in her element.
Once ashore, we waited in line for a taxi—which, in Holbox, means a golf cart—with a few Mexican families, the children already dressed for an afternoon at the beach, inflated rubber rings around their middles. Only a handful of cars travel the roughly 27-mile-long, 1-mile-wide island, including a police pickup plastered with “Wanted” posters for drug baron El Chapo. He was captured the following week thousands of miles from Holbox, although I wouldn’t have blamed him for holing up there.

Isla Holbox has a long history of providing asylum for fugitives. Said originally to have been settled by eight Mayan families, the island made a convenient stopover in the 18th century for Spanish and Italian pirates en route from the coastal states of Veracruz and Campeche. A few gave up pirating and stayed, and their descendants remain on Holbox, most living in its tiny, eponymous town on the north coast. Rosendo Avila Correa, who owns Viva Zapata restaurant, appears to have inherited the eye-twinkle and single-earring predilections of his pirate ancestors, as well as some of the bounty. In lieu of a treasure chest, he showed me an 18th-century earthenware beer bottle he’d found when digging the restaurant’s foundations, and recalled a gold nugget his aunt had unearthed in her yard. Mr. Correa also told me the local legend that on July 25, 1953, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro had a fish supper and sleepover a few blocks from Viva Zapata, before returning to Cuba, just 300 miles east, to launch the Revolution. The occasional Cuban immigrant still lands on Holbox’s shores.

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Dusk at Casa Las Tortuga’s Mandarina restaurant Photo: Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

The Gulf of Mexico might not be quite Caribbean blue, but it’s calm and warm; the beach is long, wide and white, sprinkled with seashells and the odd prehistoric-looking horseshoe-crab skeleton; flamingos gather in a pink blur out to sea; and the margaritas are cheap ($4). Come between June and September and you’ll see 40-foot whale sharks—the planet’s largest fish—gliding offshore. The three of us fell into an agreeable routine of two-hour breakfasts (swift service is not a feature of Isla Holbox) at Casa Las Tortugas’s Mandarina restaurant, or Cantina la Isla del Colibri cafe in town, where every inch is plastered with Frida Kahlo portraits, dreamcatchers and garish flower paintings. Afterward, we would take long walks along the beach and pick up fresh coconuts from a cheery Mayan-speaking vendor whose yellow cart we passed every afternoon.
One day, we rented a golf cart and headed west, past murals of fantastical sea creatures and doe-eyed children (since 2012, Holbox has hosted an annual art festival that daubs the town’s walls in graffiti), along pockmarked sandy paths, to Playa Punta Coco, an empty sweep of white sand. We passed thatched, whitewashed bungalows, three-story turreted compounds and Bond villain-style villas on stilts, interspersed with scrubby plots bearing “For Sale” signs that had us dreaming, and a colorful cemetery, where the cobalt sky set off pastel graves decorated with plastic lilies and Madonna figurines.
Off the town square, at Rosa Mexicano (no relation to the restaurants in New York), I got to chatting with co-owner Gerardo Rodrigo Hernández Gáluez. Mr. Gáluez had come to Isla Holbox on vacation, fallen in love and convinced his wife to swap the concrete jungle of Cancún for a life mostly spent barefoot. Three years ago, he opened a simple six-table restaurant serving creative interpretations of Mexican food—crispy shrimp rolled in grated coconut, filet mignon with mole—the best food we had all week.

YUCATÁN OF YORE | Three hours from Cancún, Holbox is a world away. Photo: Alicia Vera for The Wall Street Journal

Inevitably, Isla Holbox’s gentle pace of life is being affected by change. A new highway opened a little over a year ago, slashing the journey time from Cancún to Chiquilá from 4½ hours to 2½. But the greatest threat to the status quo is the potential development of a megaresort on the northeast coast of the island. Mr. Correa, who played marbles in the sandy streets and visited the mainland only twice as a child, doesn’t think it’ll happen in his lifetime. And if it does? “I asked him,” his wife, Noa, told me, “what he’ll do if the beach where his family still has a hut is turned into a golf course. He said, ‘I’ll learn to play golf.’ ” Perhaps a pragmatic attitude is the only reasonable one when a hurricane can raze your entire livelihood in an afternoon—as Hurricane Wilma did to Holbox in 2005, leaving the island underwater for two days and shredding houses to matchsticks.
On our last day, I left my husband and daughter building sand castles while I went on a kayaking and crocodile-spotting expedition with two German couples and a guide, Arnoldo. Being the only solo passenger, I had Arnoldo as my co-paddler, which proved a great advantage. The Germans dawdled behind us while Arnoldo reminisced about the Yucatán of yore. Isla Mujeres, or “island of women,” the popular, all-inclusive, high-rise-bedecked vacation spot off Cancún, was a mere girl the first time he’d visited, 30 years ago, he said. As we took a right and paddled down a river that bisects the island, thick mangrove on either side, the only sounds our own swooshing and birdsong, it was hard to imagine Isla Holbox ever suffering the same fate as Isla Mujeres. The 10-foot crocodiles for which we scanned the riverbanks never materialized, but we did see great white egrets standing like sentries on the mud flats and ibises perching above the spidery mangrove roots.
Back home, a friend reported wildlife of a different variety during her New Year’s week in Tulum. The beach had been awash with selfie sticks and amplified chests; the town clattered with four-inch heels. How much longer Holbox can resist the condos and hyped restaurants, the designer beachwear and marauding celebs is anyone’s guess. Go now—and leave your selfie stick at home.

The Lowdown // Lying Low on Holbox

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Getting there: JetBlue has daily flights from New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport to Cancún. From Cancún, it’s about 2½ hours in a taxi to the port of Chiquilá. Ferries leave for Isla Holbox every hour or so, take around 25 minutes and cost $7 per person. Or, charter a plane from Cancún, Playa Mujeres, Playa del Carmen or Cozumel to Holbox with Aerosaab, from $700 for five people. For help with transfers and hotel bookings on Isla Holbox, contact Journey Mexico (journeymexico.com).
Staying there: Casa Las Tortugas has 24 rooms, a spa, a pool, a good restaurant and a mescal bar. Book one of the beachfront palapas (from about $186; holboxcasalastortugas.com).
Eating there Go to Cantina la Isla del Colibri for breakfast, when giant aguas frescas, tasty chilaquiles (fried tortillas with salsa) and huevos rancheros are served—very slowly (Calle Tiburón, no phone). Raices Beach Club serves ferocious-looking, whole fried razor-toothed fish and great guacamole at plastic tables under a Jamaican flag (Playa Norte, +52 984 136 0017). Rosa Mexicano turns out excellent, authentic Mexican food (Calle Tiburón Ballena, +52 984 184 1174). Viva Zapata is large, lively and decorated with murals depicting scenes from Mexico’s history (Avenue Damero, +52 984 875 2362).