A Birthday in Technicolor: Turning Thirty at Cuixmala
I turned thirty in the middle of a pandemic and a palace.
Cuixmala isn’t the kind of place you casually book—it’s the kind of place that finds you when you need it most. A technicolor mirage nestled on Mexico’s Pacific coast, with wild zebras roaming the hills and architecture that feels like a fever dream had by an eccentric billionaire with a love for Morocco. Which makes sense, because… that’s kind of exactly what it is.
Shannon and I arrived barefoot in spirit and borderline feral from months of lockdown, ready for sun, salt, and a little birthday magic. And Cuixmala delivered—all of it, wrapped in tangerine walls and palm shadows.
We stayed in the Cuixmala house. Not a villa. Not a bungalow. The house. Big, bold, cinematic. Gold domes, cavernous hallways, fountains singing to no one in particular. It was the kind of place you half-expect to bump into a jaguar or a poet. Or both.
There was horseback riding through the coconut groves, the kind of horseback riding where you feel like you’re in a cologne commercial but smell like sunscreen. We spent hours at Playa Caleta, our private beach, where the Pacific stretched out like it had nowhere else to be. We saw zebras like it was totally normal, and we helped baby sea turtles find the ocean like it was our own coming-of-age movie.
And then, on October 16th—my actual birthday—my phone decided to die. Not in a poetic, cleansing, “disconnect-to-reconnect” kind of way. No. It broke. As in dead. Gone. Which, at Cuixmala, isn’t exactly a crisis… unless you’re me. The concierge basically became my IT department, and I spent part of my birthday watching someone reset my phone under a dome that probably cost more than my entire apartment. Iconic.
We drank, laughed, floated, and for the first time in months—maybe longer—I exhaled. Thirty came in quietly, like a tide. Not crashing, not raging, but with presence. With peace. With Shannon. With turtles and tequila and sunsets that looked hand-painted.
Cuixmala is one of those places you can’t really explain. You just have to feel it. It’s the kind of place that reminds you the world still holds wonder, even when everything else feels uncertain.
And somehow, that was the best birthday gift of all.
