Where

PressBeyond Logo

Best hotels in Eliat | A Curated Visual Guide to Top Stays

Welcome to PressBeyond, the ultimate curated visual guide for design-driven hotels! My name is Will Miller and this is my recommendation for the best boutique and luxury hotel in Eliat.

I am the founder of PressBeyond and I am an ultra-meticulous hotel curator who loves clean visuals. I have individually analyzed and tiered the hotel included in this guide based on a variety of criteria (architecture & design, location, brand & brand affiliation, existing reviews, and my own personal experiences), and importantly, I have hand-selected the leading imagery for this hotel to provide you with easily-digestible, yet detailed and complete, like-for-like, high-level visual profiles. I felt this summarization step was a critical missing piece across existing guides, blogs, and booking platforms. My aim is to make it easier for people to identify hotel environments that resonate with them, along with enabling them to visualize the types of social experiences that those environments help foster. My brain doesn't work when exposed to cluttered content, so my goal was to create the opposite.

Underneath this, we are also a full booking engine offering 5% Venmo cash back along with other exclusive perks. For all of you design-obsessed hotel enthusiasts out there, I hope this guide helps get you to where you see yourself!

An Overview of the Boutique & Luxury Hotel Landscape in Eliat

The Negev desert doesn't ease you in. It arrives all at once — the silence, the heat, the mineral colors of the Ramon Crater and the Arava Valley, the sense of geological time rendered visible in every striated cliff face. Eilat itself, at Israel's southernmost tip where the Red Sea meets the Jordanian and Egyptian borders, has long been the country's sun-and-diving resort, a place of waterfront hotels and coral reefs. But the more interesting proposition, architecturally and experientially, sits forty kilometers north, up in the mountains above the desert town of Mitzpe Ramon: a community called Shaharut, perched at nearly a thousand meters, where the light does things to sandstone and shadow that no coastal resort can approximate. Six Senses Shaharut opened in 2021, designed by the Israeli architects Amir Mann and Ami Shinar in close collaboration with the Six Senses design team, and it is one of the more rigorous acts of desert architecture completed in Israel in recent memory. The buildings are low, earthen-toned, and deliberately self-effacing — carved into the ridge rather than placed upon it, their rammed-earth and stone walls absorbing and releasing heat in the manner of traditional desert construction. The pool appears to float above the crater's edge. Each of the private lodges is oriented toward a specific desert view, and the interiors balance rough local materials with the kind of careful spare comfort that Six Senses has refined across its portfolio in Jordan, Oman, and Bhutan. It does not feel transplanted. The terraced landscape architecture reads as continuous with the surrounding wilderness rather than imposed upon it. For a traveler whose interest runs toward architecture and landscape over beach infrastructure, the calculus here is straightforward. Eilat's Red Sea access and coral diving remain genuinely exceptional, and the airport makes the city a logical entry point, but the stay that will stay with you is in the hills above the crater. Shaharut is not a compromise or a detour — it is the reason to come to this part of Israel at all. The desert around it is protected, the silence is complete after dark, and the architecture earns its setting rather than merely occupying it. That is rarer than it sounds, in this region or anywhere else.

Book with PB and get cash back
Six Senses Shaharut - Image 1
Six Senses Shaharut - Image 2
Six Senses Shaharut - Image 3
Six Senses Shaharut - Image 4
Six Senses Shaharut - Image 5

Six Senses Shaharut

Eliat • Shaharut • OVER THE TOP

avg. $915 / night

Includes $48 / night in cash back

Cash back is redeemable via Virtual Visa, Venmo, or bank transfer starting 24-48 hours after check-out

IHG® One Rewards property

Six Senses Shaharut Design Editorial

Cresting a ridge in Israel's Negev desert, where the ancient Incense Route once traced its way toward the Red Sea, a low-slung row of rough-hewn stone pavilions glows amber against the dusk — a silhouette that could belong to a Nabataean settlement if not for the floor-to-ceiling glazing catching the last of the desert light. Six Senses Shaharut, which opened in 2020 near the town of Shaharut overlooking the Arava Valley, was designed by Israeli architect Amir Mann-Ami Shinar Architects and Planners, with the brief centered on near-invisibility: the massing follows the ridge contour, and the local sandstone used throughout the construction ties the structure physically to its plateau in a way that renders it almost indistinguishable from the escarpment at distance. Inside, the design moves between raw materiality and considered restraint. Rooms are finished in tadelakt-smooth plaster, their floors laid in herringbone terracotta brick, furnished with Beni Ourain-style wool rugs in red and cream and low-slung beds dressed in natural linen. The restaurant's ceiling — an intricate lattice of split timber poles laid in a diagonal geometric pattern — draws directly from traditional Bedouin and Nabataean craft, while kilim-upholstered dining chairs and a monumental driftwood bench ground the space in the nomadic material culture of the wider region. Unpeeled eucalyptus columns support the pool pergola overhead, framing an infinity edge that dissolves into the Jordanian mountains beyond.

Best hotels in Eliat | A Curated Visual Guide to Top Stays