Best hotels in Sumbawa Besar, Indonesia | Visually Compare Top Stays Side-by-Side

An Overview of the Boutique & Luxury Hotel Landscape in Sumbawa Besar, Indonesia

Sumbawa sits east of Lombok in the Lesser Sunda chain, an island of volcanic ridges, dry savanna grasslands, and coastline that sees a fraction of the traffic Bali absorbs. The town of Sumbawa Besar itself is a working administrative center, not a destination in the conventional sense — its sultan's palace, the Dalam Loka, remains one of the more underexamined examples of traditional Sumbawan timber architecture in the region, raised on 99 pillars and built without a single nail. But travelers who reach this part of Indonesia are rarely pausing in the town for long. They are orienting themselves toward the water, toward the islands that sit just offshore in the Flores Sea, and specifically toward Moyo. Moyo Island is a nature reserve, largely forested, and almost entirely free of the kind of incremental tourist development that has consumed so much of western Indonesia. Amanwana, the Aman resort that occupies a sheltered bay on the island's western shore, has been here since 1993, which makes it one of the earlier expressions of the camp-as-architecture sensibility that Aman refined across Southeast Asia in that period. The property consists of tented pavilions set directly into the forest edge, where the canopy meets the beach, with the tents themselves engineered for permanence — air-conditioned, solid-floored, finished in natural materials — while maintaining the spatial and visual character of something provisional and close to the ground. There are no hard boundaries between accommodation and forest. The architecture, such as it is, makes that porousness its central idea. For anyone drawn to places where the built environment defers to its surroundings rather than competing with them, Amanwana is a serious proposition. The remoteness is genuine, the marine environment around Moyo is exceptional for diving and snorkeling, and the resort's scale, just 20 tents, ensures a stillness that larger properties cannot manufacture. Lady Diana famously visited in 1993, which brought Moyo a moment of international attention, but the island has resisted the transformation that kind of visibility often accelerates. What remains is a place that requires real commitment to reach — connections through Bali or Lombok, then a speedboat transfer — and rewards that commitment with a quality of quiet that grows harder to locate in this archipelago every year.