One-bedroom stays in Puerto Morelos for garden days

Four one-bedroom apartments in our Puerto Morelos portfolio suit this trip, and all four sit in the same building, Porto Blu, in the middle of town: Elegant Porto Blu Apartment 106, Apartment with Front-Facing View and Terrace, Comodidad y estilo en Puerto Morelos, and Oasis en Planta Baja con Cama King y Jardín. The one you want depends on how many of you there are, what floor you want to wake up on, and whether anyone in the party plans to work for an hour while the other sleeps in.

The Jardín Botánico Dr. Alfredo Barrera Marín, which everyone here calls Yaax'Ché, sits just south of town on the federal highway between Cancún and Playa del Carmen. It opens at eight in the morning and closes at four in the afternoon, and a reviewer's estimate of forty-five minutes to an hour to walk the whole thing matches what guests tell us. Sixty-five hectares, a chiclero camp, a small archaeological site, a suspension bridge strung over the mangrove. It is a morning, not a day, which is the single most useful thing to know when you are choosing where to sleep: you want a base you can leave early, return to by noon, and not feel trapped in for the rest of the afternoon.

Why staying in town beats staying beside the garden

Go early. The garden opens at eight and the heat and the mosquitoes both arrive with the middle of the day, so the sensible version of this trip is a taxi out, the loop walked at a reasonable pace, and lunch back in Puerto Morelos by one. That rhythm only works from somewhere with a kitchen, a shower, and a pool to fall into afterwards, which is exactly what these four apartments are.

Porto Blu stands a five-minute walk from the central plaza, the leaning lighthouse and the artisans' cooperative, and five or six minutes from the water at Playa Ojo de Agua and the reef park. Every one of these apartments has free parking and a bicycle rack downstairs, so a rental car for the garden run is easy enough, though taxis are constant here and the road out is the main highway. The airport is twenty to twenty-five minutes up Highway 307, the shortest transfer on this coast, which is why people who have done the Riviera Maya before keep coming back to this town rather than Cancún.

One thing to be clear about: several of these apartments list a garden among their amenities, and that is the planted courtyard inside the building, nothing to do with Yaax'Ché.

The four apartments, and who each one is for

Elegant Porto Blu Apartment 106 is the Manatí model: one bedroom with a King bed, two full bathrooms, a dining table set for five, and a desk credenza in the bedroom. It sleeps five, between the King, a sofa bed in the living room and a pull-out single. The dedicated workspace is the detail that decides things. If one of you is taking calls on a Tuesday morning while the other walks the mangrove bridge, this is the apartment where that happens without someone perching a laptop on the dining table.

Apartment with Front-Facing View and Terrace sits on the upper floors, apartment 405, with a front-facing view and a private balcony that catches the breeze. Listed occupancy is six, the highest of the four one-bedrooms, across the bedroom, a sofa and the living space. The building's rooftop pool with its loungers is a lift ride away, and after a morning in the heat that ride is worth more than any view.

Comodidad y estilo en Puerto Morelos, apartment 206, is the one to look at when the bed count matters more than the bedroom count. Two Queen beds in the bedroom plus a double sofa bed, sleeping five, and a dining table for six. Two friends travelling together, or a parent with older kids, get real beds rather than a negotiation. The kitchen here runs to melamine dinnerware for outdoor use alongside the ceramics, a small thing that tells you people eat on the terrace and on the rooftop.

Oasis en Planta Baja con Cama King y Jardín is on the ground floor, apartment 102, with a King bed, two bathrooms and a view into the building's interior courtyard rather than out over the town. Listed for four, the smallest occupancy of the four, and the most straightforwardly a couple's apartment. No lift wait with wet towels and a bag of market fruit, and after a morning on your feet in the garden that counts for something. The quiet hours here run from ten at night to eight in the morning, a touch longer than elsewhere in the building.

Reading the occupancy numbers properly

All four are listed as one-bedroom, and the occupancy range runs from four to six. The extra guests always sleep in the living room on a sofa bed, which is worth knowing before you book for five and discover the arrangement at midnight. Two people in any of them have a great deal of room, since each has two full bathrooms and around a thousand square feet.

• Two of you: Oasis en Planta Baja, for the King bed and the ground floor.
• Two of you, one working: Apartment 106, for the desk.
• Four sharing, wanting real beds: Comodidad y estilo, for the two Queens.
• Five or six: Apartment with Front-Facing View and Terrace, the highest listed occupancy of the four.

If the group grows past six, the building also has two-bedroom penthouses, among them Penthouse Tucán, with a private jacuzzi and furnished terraces, sleeping eight.

What you'll actually use

The kitchen, first. Every one of these apartments has a full kitchen with a stove, oven, fridge, blender and coffee maker, and the practical value of that on a garden morning is a pot of coffee at half past six rather than waiting for somewhere to open. The in-unit washer-dryer matters more than it sounds: you will come back from Yaax'Ché damp, and you will come back from the reef salty, and doing both in the same week without a laundry run is the difference between packing light and not.

Blackout curtains in all four, which is how you sleep through a bright Caribbean morning if you don't want to be up at six. Each apartment has a safe and a smart lock with a digital code, so arrival is keyless and works at any hour. None of the four takes pets, and all are entirely smoke-free.

The rooftop is shared, and it is the reason people stay in this building: a pool with loungers looking over the town and the sea. Free parking downstairs, a bicycle rack beside it.

Booking, and what to ask us

Book direct with Grupo Select and you deal with us rather than an intermediary, with no hidden charges on top. We answer messages between nine in the morning and six in the evening, and the most useful thing to ask before you arrive is not about the apartment at all: tell us the morning you want to do the garden and we'll tell you how to get out there and back, and where to eat when you return. Concierge support comes with the stay.

Puerto Morelos rewards people who plan one thing a day. The garden is that thing on the morning you do it. The rest of the day is the rooftop, the plaza, and a seafood lunch you didn't have to drive for.