Borgo Santandrea is a five-star hotel built down the cliff above Conca dei Marini, the old fishing village a few minutes west of Amalfi. Two Italian hotel families took a 1960s hotel on the site and rebuilt it over almost four years, and it welcomed its first guests in 2021. The aim, in the owners' words, was a villa by the sea rather than a hotel: whitewashed arches, terraces and stairways stacked over 90 metres of cliff, joined by eight lifts. The MICHELIN Guide gives it Three Keys, its highest rating for a hotel.
There are 52 rooms and suites, set between 50 and 79 metres above the sea, and most face it. The entry Classic rooms, up to 25 m², look over the terraced gardens beside the building through floor-to-ceiling windows; the Superior rooms, 28 to 32 m², have a balcony and a side view of the sea; the Deluxe Sea View rooms, 30 to 40 m², look straight out across the water. Above them come the suites, from the 45 to 55 m² Junior Suite to the 137 m² Premium Suite with its own garden, and three kinds of suite with a private infinity pool heated to as much as 30 °C. Every bathroom is in marble, most with a walk-in shower.
Design is the reason to book. The owners furnished it with their own collection of mid-century pieces from Italy, Scandinavia and Argentina, reupholstered in Italian fabrics, alongside Gio Ponti chairs and tables made today by Molteni&C and furniture made for the rooms by local craftsmen. Local artisans made 31 designs of handmade, hand-painted tile, drawing on geometric patterns from Pompeii, Herculaneum and Cuma and on Gio Ponti, and many rooms are floored in their blue and white. The same eye runs down the cliff: the Plumbago bar at the top, the terrace of Alici, which holds a MICHELIN star, a saltwater pool on the way down, and at the bottom a white pebble beach reserved for guests, with a lunch restaurant in a nineteenth-century fishermen's boathouse and the hotel's own jetty.
The trade is the price and the distance. On a June night in 2027 a Superior room cost about €2,745 with breakfast, and the sea-view rooms and suites climb from there. The hotel stands on the coast road 3.4 km from Amalfi, not in a town, so evenings out mean the hotel's free car and boat shuttle to Amalfi, or a taxi, and children are welcome only from the age of eight. Book it for a design-led stay where the beach, the pool and dinner are all on the property; skip it if you want to walk out of the door into Positano or Amalfi.
