Bali’s cliffside resorts with infinity pools: the finest, honestly reviewed
The Bukit Peninsula in southern Bali is a limestone plateau that ends, on its southern and western edges, in cliffs. Not gentle slopes to the water — cliffs, dropping forty, sixty, a hundred and fifty metres to the Indian Ocean below, with the swell arriving from the open ocean without interruption and the surf breaking against the base of the rock in a continuous slow percussion that is audible from the pools above. The architects who discovered this landscape in the 1990s and began building on its edges understood something immediately: that the cliff was not a complication to be managed but the entire point, and that the hotel’s job was to place its guests at the edge of it and then get out of the way.
The infinity pool was the instrument by which this ambition was most completely realised. A conventional pool at the edge of a Uluwatu cliff would have a railing between the water and the drop. The infinity pool removes the railing — visually, if not physically — and replaces the barrier with a horizon line that appears to continue directly into the sea a hundred metres below and the sky beyond it. The effect, experienced from the water rather than the sunlounger, is one of the most spatially disorienting and physically pleasurable things available in resort travel anywhere in the world. You float at the edge of a cliff above the Indian Ocean and the boundary between the pool and the ocean is, for a moment, something your body believes does not exist.
The cliff hotels of Bali’s Bukit Peninsula have been building toward this experience with varying degrees of success for thirty years. The ones that achieve it fully, and the ones that approach it and fall short, are what this guide covers.
The Edge, Uluwatu: the glass floor and the drop
The Edge earns the name without irony. The resort’s signature pool — a glass-bottomed sky pool that extends six metres over the cliff’s limestone rim — is the most vertically dramatic piece of swimming infrastructure in Bali and one of the most extraordinary in the world. Standing on the glass floor and looking down at the cliff face below, then looking up at the horizon, produces a specific physical sensation that is not quite fear and not quite exhilaration but something that occupies the space between them. The pool is not large. It is not designed for lap swimming or family play. It is designed for the moment — the one that most guests photograph and then put the camera down for, because the photograph, however good, cannot contain what the body feels standing at the edge of Bali on a glass floor above the ocean.
Beyond the sky pool, The Edge’s eight villas each have their own infinity pool positioned above the cliff, and the resort’s rock-framed lagoon pool and rounded central pool provide the swimming environment for the hours that the sky pool’s intensity makes the more contemplative option preferable. The dining at The Edge — contemporary Southeast Asian, delivered to the villa or served at the cliff-edge restaurant — reflects a kitchen that understands the environment it occupies: the menu is good enough to justify staying for dinner rather than driving down into Uluwatu’s independent restaurant scene, which is a more meaningful endorsement than it sounds for a resort whose view is already doing most of the evening’s heavy lifting.
Alila Villas Uluwatu: the 50-metre cliff-edge infinity pool
Alila Villas Uluwatu occupies a clifftop plateau on the Bukit’s southern coast and delivers the cliffside infinity pool experience at the largest scale available on the peninsula. The main pool stretches 50 metres along the cliff edge — long enough to swim in properly rather than float at the edge — and was designed by Singapore architectural firm WOHA with an attention to the relationship between the pool’s surface and the Indian Ocean horizon that makes the connection between them feel deliberate rather than incidental. At dawn, before anyone else has arrived, the pool’s surface catches the light in a way that makes the horizon difficult to locate, which is the effect the design was built to produce.
Each of the resort’s 65 villas has its own private pool — smaller, more intimate, and oriented toward either the ocean or the surrounding savanna landscape depending on the villa’s position within the property. The villa pool is the one you will use most frequently; the main pool is the one that earns the resort its reputation. The WOHA architecture — raw concrete and natural stone, open to the breeze, designed to make the indoor-outdoor distinction irrelevant — creates an environment that feels simultaneously designed to the last detail and entirely at ease in the landscape it occupies. The spa, the yoga pavilion, and the cliff-edge temple trail that connects the property to the Uluwatu Temple complex add cultural and wellness dimensions that distinguish Alila Villas from the purely visual proposition of certain neighbouring properties.
Bvlgari Resort Bali: 150 metres above Nunggalan Beach
The Bvlgari Resort’s split-level infinity pool looks almost directly down onto Nunggalan Beach 150 metres below — a vertiginous relationship between the pool and the ocean that the resort’s cliff-face positioning makes unavoidable and that the pool’s design embraces rather than softens. The elevation is the highest of any resort pool on the Bukit Peninsula, and the view from the water encompasses a panorama that extends from the limestone cliff face below to an Indian Ocean horizon that, on a clear morning, appears to curve with the planet. The resort’s own elevator descends through the cliff to the beach — one of the finest in Bali, naturally sheltered by the surrounding cliff walls — making the 150-metre height difference a feature rather than an obstacle.
The Bvlgari brand’s presence in the design is felt throughout — in the materials, the finishes, the specific weight of everything from the pool furniture to the room amenities — and the resort is the most architecturally opulent on the Bukit Peninsula by a considerable margin. For the traveller whose idea of a Bali cliffside experience includes this level of material luxury alongside the natural drama, the Bvlgari is the answer. For the traveller who finds the brand’s aesthetic slightly too polished for the wild edge of a Balinese cliff, Alila Villas or Six Senses will serve better.
Six Senses Uluwatu: the cliff with a conscience
Six Senses Uluwatu is Bali’s only World Green Building Council-certified resort, which is a designation that reflects an operational seriousness about sustainability rather than a marketing position. The property is perched on the southern cliff edge, with its signature cliff-top pool offering the standard Bukit Peninsula visual proposition — infinity edge, Indian Ocean, the drop below — within a property whose organic architecture, on-site organic garden, and wellness programming give the week a dimension that the purely visual cliff hotel experience does not provide. The Six Senses approach here is the same as at its properties elsewhere: the spa is the primary facility, the food programme is rooted in organic produce and nutritional philosophy, and the comprehensive package structure makes the week financially settled in the way that justifies the investment.
The wellness programming at Six Senses Uluwatu draws on Balinese healing tradition — the botanical knowledge, the energy philosophy of the island’s Hindu culture — with a seriousness that distinguishes it from the spa menu approach of properties that use “Balinese” as an aesthetic descriptor rather than a philosophical one. For the couple or solo traveller who wants the cliff and the pool and the view and also wants to leave the week feeling physically and mentally different from how they arrived, Six Senses is the specific answer that the other Bukit Peninsula properties do not provide in the same form.
Anantara Uluwatu: the multi-tiered pool and the northern cliff
Anantara Uluwatu occupies the northern edge of the Bukit Peninsula above a stretch of cliff that catches the afternoon light differently from the southern exposure of the Bvlgari and Alila properties — warmer, more amber in the late afternoon, with the sunset visible across the full width of the Indian Ocean horizon rather than to one side of it. The resort’s multi-tiered infinity pool cascades down the cliff face in a series of connected levels that produce a variety of swimming environments within a single pool complex: the upper tier for the view, the lower tiers for the water temperature that the cliff’s shadow produces in the afternoon, and the transition between them as a spatial experience in its own right. The 75 suites, pool villas, and penthouses are positioned to maximise the cliff views, and the butler service that accompanies the upper categories is attentive in the way that genuinely good Balinese hospitality tends to be — present before the need is expressed rather than responsive after it is stated.
What the Bukit Peninsula’s cliff hotels share and what distinguishes them
Every cliffside resort on the Bukit Peninsula has an extraordinary view. The view is not, therefore, the differentiator — it is the baseline. What distinguishes the properties from each other is the quality of the architecture’s relationship with the landscape (the best, like Alila Villas and Six Senses, feel grown from the cliff rather than placed on it), the food programme’s engagement with Balinese culinary tradition versus the international luxury default, the depth of the wellness offering versus the spa-as-amenity approach, and the specific character of the pool — whether it is designed primarily for photography, primarily for swimming, or primarily for the experience of floating at the edge of something enormous.
The Bukit Peninsula’s resorts are not all-inclusive in the Caribbean flat-rate sense, and the honest guide acknowledges this: the food and beverage, spa treatments, and activities at most of these properties are charged separately, and the total cost of a week at any of them requires budgeting beyond the room rate. What the comprehensive packages at Six Senses and Alila fold into their rates — meals, wellness programming, guided cultural activities — produces the most complete financial package available on the peninsula, and for the traveller for whom the all-inclusive structure’s financial simplicity is part of the appeal, these two properties are the ones to prioritise.
