Travel off-peak during a region’s so-called “shoulder season” can be some of the smartest and most enjoyable there is. But every so often, there is an exact right week or month to visit a place. One way to know what that ideal season is: Follow the area’s fruit.
Fruit coming into peak harvest—or the moment just before it does—can be especially pilgrimage-worthy in the regions that grow it best. Offering some of the most memorable vantage points, interesting history lessons, or just the perfect dappled shade beneath which to have a drink, fruit trees and orchards can be an anchoring attraction and unique access point into a place.
At some properties, hoteliers have built their very hotels around the fruit-bearing trees or plants themselves. In other regions, the right room might just be the one positioned perfectly—intentionally or not—to give you easy access to the picking, or at least the tasting, action. Here are eight hotels that can place you in the ideal spot to reap the rewards of the most delicious local harvests.
Salento, Puglia, for Olives
Approximately 72 hectares (175 acres) of olive trees—many near one-thousand years old—surround the dwellings at Masseria il Frantoio in the Salento region of Puglia. The trees’ gnarled and imposing trunks “seem carved by the expert hand of some local artist,'' according to the hotel, which each year grows and then harvests the fruit of 4,200 of them using organic methods. After the olive fruits are shaken down, four different extra-virgin olive oils are produced from the property yield. (One was acknowledged as among the best from the region by the Italian Slow Food Guide.) The property has been an active farm for five centuries, and today is a comfortable and classic southern Italian guest house as well.
Due south, in the Baroque province of Lecce and a comune called Gagliano del Capo—as far down in Italy’s heel as it goes—the land is similarly covered with more of the 60 million registered olive trees that grow in Puglia. Use one of the nine crisp and contemporary but warm rooms at Palazzo Daniele, a self-described art house in an aristocratic 1861 palazzo, as home base to explore the mythological looking groves. Trees both old and young fill the groves of the countless olive oil producers nearby. Many are in a quest to save their precious groves from Xylella, a blight that has been chipping away at the area for several years. Now is the time to see and support them.
Wachau Valley, Austria, for Apricots
This fertile valley, which gets much of its growing power from the rich soil surrounding the River Danube, produces some of the world’s most colorful and flavorful apricots. Around the curves and bends of the river, bordering castles and little villages, terraces of saturated green start being washed over with cascading pink and white blooms near the end of March, when the region’s 100,000 apricot trees begin to blossom. The show is especially dramatic in the Rossatz-Arnsdorf. Perch directly across the river at Hotel Schloss Dürnstein —a boutique Relais & Château hotel built into a castle from the 1600s—for incredible views. The fruit hits its peak in July, where it’s picked using traditional tapered baskets and in some cases sold moments later to passersby. At the hotel, the dessert menu has the signature seasonal dishes of the region: handmade apricot dumplings and Austrian apricot pancakes with homemade jam using the local fruit.
Launceston, Tasmania, for Berries
When the deepest parts of winter fall over the northwestern hemisphere, Tasmania is just coasting into its high berry season. Some of the world’s best blueberries, cherries, and raspberries start appearing across the island in December and the juiciest blackberries follow in January. From the early 1800s, small fruits began to be cultivated by small family farms in Tasmania, starting primarily in the south of the island and then moving upward. A particularly ideal microclimate was realized along the banks of the Tamar River in and around Launceston, where small properties still operate mostly family run farms. At Stillwater Seven, a sister hotel to a seasonally focused restaurant that came before it, it is less than three minutes’ ride to the most thriving hub of farms, farmers, and local cooks and chefs called the Harvest Launceston Community Farmers’ Market. Meandering the stalls and buying fruit by the basketful is the way to spend a Saturday morning, and during off times, the hotel—composed of just seven architectural rooms built into an old 1830s flour mill—can coordinate a trip to one of the local berry farms.
The Konkan Coast, India, for Alphonso Mangoes
Mango is India’s national fruit, and a dizzying swirl of smells, colors, and various sizes are stacked high in markets from early April through the late summer. Among the many varieties (Neelam, Pairi, Amarapali, Malgesh, Totapuri and more), the Alphonso mango (called “Hapus” locally, and named after a Portuguese expeditionist from the 16th century) has long been the most prized, and expensive. The petite, golden variety is grown largely in western India’s Maharashtra region and the Konkan Coast, and—because of their juiciness and high perishability—best eaten at the source. In Sindhudurg in the Konkan, where the mangoes get a geographical indication tag similar to Darjeeling tea, a stay at one of Coco Shambhala’s four private beach villas, surrounded by wild tropical gardens and sandy coast, is in good proximity to the growing plains. Eat multiples of the fruit on its own, often delivered to the villas for breakfast, or find it around nearby neighborhood markets in mango candies, spicy pickles, paratha, and many other dishes.
