A Bali Eco Retreat: Earth Love Sanctuary
Three hours north of the airport, the Bali you were promised is still sitting there, waiting, slightly annoyed that nobody comes to visit.
The road does its best to discourage you. Whichever way you come — up over the volcanic rim at Kintamani, or around the east coast through Amed — there is a stretch where you start wondering whether a place this far out can possibly justify the journey.
Then you come over the last ridge above Les Village, the land drops away, and the whole north coast opens up in front of you: forest, then roofs that look more grown than built, then the Bali Sea going flat and silver to the horizon. Mount Batur is somewhere behind your shoulder. The air is about four degrees cooler than the one you left in Canggu, and it smells like wet leaves instead of two-stroke exhaust.
This is Bumi Cinta — Earth Love — and it is one of the most quietly serious eco retreats on the island.
Disclosure: Bumi Cinta is owned by the publisher of this site. It is deliberately excluded from every roundup, ranking and “best of” guide here, and always will be. This profile is the one place on Bali Eco Retreats where we write about it directly — so read it as a detailed look at the property, not as an independent verdict.
The North Coast, and Why Nobody Goes
Here is the thing about Bali that takes most visitors a second or third trip to work out: the island everyone argues about online is a sliver of it. Canggu, Seminyak, Uluwatu, plus Ubud inland — call it fifteen percent of the landmass holding the overwhelming majority of the visitors.
The Tejakula district on the north coast is not in that sliver. It is a working coastline of fishing villages, salt production and black-sand beaches where the only tourist infrastructure is the one you are deliberately driving to. Les Village sits in the hills above it.
Three hours of road is a filter, and filters are the reason anything on this island stays intact. The places an hour from the airport were beautiful once too. We go into this at length in the guide to Bali away from the crowds, but the short version is: distance is the last defense, and the north coast still has it.
Kaja and Kelod
Worth knowing before you arrive, because it explains the whole site layout. Balinese spatial thinking runs along an axis between kaja — toward the mountain, the sacred direction — and kelod, toward the sea. Temples, doorways and villages all orient to it.
Bumi Cinta sits between Mount Batur and the ocean, facing north. That is not a view preference dressed up in philosophy. It is why the air is cool at this elevation, why the light moves the way it does across the day, and — the practical bit — why there is a freshwater spring above the property at all.
The Tree That Designed the Place
Every eco retreat in Bali has an origin story, and most of them are marketing. This one is a bit different, mostly because of what it cost.
Before construction started, the land guardian — a Balinese man named Madé, who still manages the property — went and sat with the oldest tree on the site. An ancient grandmother, roots running beneath most of what is now the retreat. He sat with her for a long time. Then he came back and said where the paths wanted to go and where each building should open.
They built around her instead of over her.
You notice this without being told. Pathways bend for no visible structural reason. Buildings sit at angles that a surveyor would never have drawn. The usual approach in Bali — and you can see it from the air across the whole south — is to cut and fill until the land is flat, then place the resort on top. Here the land won the argument.
Go and sit with her. Guests are welcome at the mother tree, and most people end up there without consciously deciding to. Early morning, before the kitchen gets going, is when the forest is loudest.
Water: The Thing That Actually Matters
If you only interrogate one thing about an eco property in Bali, make it water. The island is in a slow-moving groundwater crisis, driven substantially by tourism — pools, laundry, long showers, irrigated lawns — drawing from aquifers faster than rain replaces them. It is the single least-discussed environmental problem in Balinese tourism and the one most “eco” resorts quietly sidestep.
Bumi Cinta has a natural spring above the property. Everything runs off it: the gardens, the pools, the kitchen, every shower. It is filtered before it reaches you, but it is mountain water the entire way down, and it means the property is not competing with anyone’s rice field or village well.
The pools are fed by that spring and cleaned biologically — by plants, not chlorine. This is the detail that lands hardest in person. You get in expecting the usual chemical sting and instead it is soft, slightly cool, and smells of absolutely nothing.
Yeh Mempeh
A short distance from the property is Yeh Mempeh — “Flying Waters” — one of the tallest single-tier waterfalls in Bali. Balinese people have come here to heal and to pray for generations, and it was the reason the founders ended up in this valley at all.
Go early, and treat it as what it is: a working sacred site, not a photo location. Dress appropriately, follow whatever guidance you are given, and if there is a ceremony happening, stay out of the way and watch.
The Architecture, Up Close
Bamboo, reclaimed timber and local stone throughout, built by craftspeople from the surrounding villages. If you want the technical background on why these materials suit the climate — and how to tell structural bamboo from bamboo cladding stuck on a concrete frame — the piece on sustainable architecture in Bali covers it.
What you get here is the real version. The structures are doing load-bearing work.
The Main Hall
Shaped like a manta ray, which sounds like a stretch until you walk in and look up — the bamboo ribs really do sweep out like wings. Cathedral ceilings, open on every side, ocean in the distance.
This is where meals happen and where the day collects. It is also the building that demonstrates what bamboo can do when someone has actually engineered it rather than decorated with it.
The Yoga Shala
Bamboo and hardwood, open-sided, oriented out to sea. No walls between you and the weather, which at this elevation is the entire point — you get the breeze without the coastal humidity.
The floor has give in it, which matters more than people realize, and the acoustics are good enough that a teacher does not have to shout over the forest.
Barefoot Bungalows
Set into the forest, each one shaped like something that grew rather than something that was assembled. Far enough apart that what you hear at night is the forest and not the people next door.
Fair warning, and it applies to every genuine bamboo property on this island: open-sided living means geckos, insects, rain on the roof and roosters at dawn. For most people who choose places like this, that is the holiday. If it is not, book concrete.
Sauna, Steam and Plunge
Dry sauna, steam room, infrared, plunge pools, with massage and healing practitioners on site and on call.
Contrast therapy in Bali is usually a slightly comic exercise — you leave the sauna into 32°C and 85% humidity and nothing happens. Up here the outside air is genuinely cool, so the hot–cold cycle actually works. It is one of the few places on the island where this is true.
Open-Air Living
Co-working corners, chillout zones, a gift shop and a natural clothing store, with reception on call. Unglamorous to describe and disproportionately important in practice — the hours between sessions are what determine whether a retreat feels generous or institutional.
For Yoga People
If you practice, a few things are worth knowing.
The Shala faces north over the sea, so morning practice is lit rather than blinding, and you are not fighting direct sun at 7am the way you are on an east-facing deck. Elevation means you can move properly at ten in the morning without the heat exhaustion that makes mid-morning classes in the south a slog.
The evening situation is better too. Dusk at a coastal or paddy-side shala in Bali is usually a negotiation with mosquitoes; up here it is mostly a non-issue, which means restorative and yin sessions actually land.
What it is not is a studio with a timetable. There is no drop-in schedule with six classes a day and a rotating cast of international teachers — for that, Ubud is the answer, and the guide to Bali’s yoga retreats and training schools is the place to start. Bumi Cinta is a retreat property: practice happens as part of a hosted retreat, or because you have come here with your own.
For facilitators: a large part of what this property does is host other people’s retreats, and the infrastructure reflects that — shala, separated accommodation, a kitchen used to dietary complexity, spa and bodywork on site for integration days, and a sacred waterfall within reach for ceremony.
Does the Eco Claim Hold Up?
This site has a whole article on how to interrogate an eco retreat’s claims, so it would be poor form not to apply the same questions here.
The questionWhat’s actually true hereWhere does the water come from?A natural spring above the property — not the aquifer. Pools filtered by plants, not chlorine.Is the bamboo structural or decorative?Structural. The main hall and Shala are bamboo buildings, not bamboo-clad ones.Was the site flattened?No. Layout follows the terrain, and the mother tree dictated the paths.Air conditioning everywhere?No — elevation, orientation and open-air construction do the cooling.Who built and staffs it?People from the surrounding villages, in a regency with far less tourism investment than the south.Scale relative to land?Small. A handful of bungalows across a large forested site.
The Honest Gap
Every property in Bali has one, and pretending otherwise is how greenwashing starts. Here it is guest transport. Three hours of road each way, usually by private car, is a real carbon cost that no amount of spring water offsets. Staying longer is the only meaningful mitigation — which is an argument for a week rather than two nights, and happens to be the thing most guests end up wanting anyway.
If the regenerative-versus-sustainable distinction is new to you, the piece on regenerative tourism in Bali sets out why the gap between the two words is the whole argument.
The Team
A beautiful building is a building. What makes a retreat work is whether someone is holding the details while you are not thinking about them.
WhoRoleWhat they doCherRetreat DirectorGuides guests and visiting facilitators through the arc of a stayNyomanGeneral ManagerWelcomes arrivals; the person who explains the land and its cultureMadéLand ManagerTends the land, its spirit and its stories — and the one who sat with the tree
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The promise the staff hold each other to is a single line, and it is a better mission statement than most properties manage in a paragraph:
“Leave each person feeling like home, in your own body.”
Who This Suits ..and Who It Doesn’t
Go If
- You want genuine quiet, and you have been to Bali before and found it loud
- You are staying five nights or more, so the drive amortizes
- You care how the water system works, not just how the pool photographs
- You are a facilitator looking for a venue where the group has nothing to wander off to
- You like cool nights, open-sided rooms and the sound of a forest
Don’t Go If
- You are in Bali for four nights and want to see a lot of it
- You want a daily drop-in yoga timetable and a choice of cafés — go to Ubud
- You are combining the trip with surfing — the breaks are on the other coast
- You want nightlife, shopping, or walkable restaurants
- Insects, geckos and rain on a roof would genuinely bother you
That second list is not false modesty. The quickest way to have a bad time at a remote retreat is to arrive wanting the thing it deliberately isn’t.
Getting There and When to Go
The Drive
About three hours from Ngurah Rai airport. Two routes: over the mountains via Kintamani, which is slower but takes you past Mount Batur and its caldera, or around the east coast through Amed, which is gentler going and beautiful in a different way. Arrange transport in advance — this is not a drive to attempt on a scooter with luggage.
Season
The north coast sits in a rain shadow and is noticeably drier than the south and centre of the island. April to October is the most reliable stretch, but the wet season here is far gentler than Ubud’s, and everything is quieter and greener for it.
Check the date of Nyepi, the Balinese Day of Silence, before booking flights — the whole island shuts down, airport included. Spending it on a dark hillside with no traffic and no light pollution is, by most accounts, one of the great travel experiences available anywhere.
Nearby
- Yeh Mempeh waterfall — a short distance away
- Tejakula — a working north-coast village, known for its horse bath
- Amed and Tulamben — some of Bali’s best diving and snorkelling, east along the coast
- Mount Batur — sunrise treks, inland and up
- Lovina — west along the north coast
The Website and contacts
I found their website to be full of really helpful information, tools and resources. For example their retreat map basically gives you everything you need to imagine what its like being there in person or hosting a retreat.
- Website: https://bumicintabali.com
- instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bumicintabali/
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/bumicintabali
- WhatsApp: https://wa.me/6282340654990
- Address: https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=-8.154334,115.36807&z=12&t=m&hl=en-US&gl=US&mapclient=embed&q=Bumi%20cinta%20bali
- Venue Map: https://bumicintabali.com/map
Common Questions
Is three hours from the airport too far?
It depends entirely on your trip length. For four nights, stay south. For a week or more, the drive is a rounding error and the thing it protects is the reason to come. You do it once at each end.
Do I need to practice yoga to stay here?
No. Plenty of guests come to rest, swim, eat well and walk to the waterfall. The Shala is there if you want it.
Can I host my own retreat here?
Yes — hosting visiting facilitators is a large part of what the property does, and the team and infrastructure are built around it. Enquiries go through the Host With Us section of the main Bumi Cinta site.
Is the water safe to drink?
Yes. It comes from a natural spring above the property and is filtered before it reaches the taps. The same source feeds the gardens, pools and kitchen.
How does the weather compare to southern Bali?
Cooler and cleaner thanks to the elevation, and drier because the north coast sits in a rain shadow. Most guests sleep under a blanket rather than air conditioning.
How is this different from an eco retreat in Ubud?
Water, air and silence, essentially. Its own mountain spring rather than a stressed aquifer, elevation instead of humidity, and no town around it. Ubud wins decisively on choice — classes, restaurants, workshops, teachers. This is a real trade-off, not a claim to be better at everything.
Keep Reading
- The top 5 Bali eco retreats — the independent roundup, which excludes this property
- How to choose a Bali eco retreat — the questions worth asking anywhere, including here
- Regenerative tourism in Bali — why the word matters
- Sustainable architecture in Bali — bamboo, earth and passive cooling
- Bali away from the crowds — the quiet regions, north included
The Verdict
Bumi Cinta is not trying to be the most convenient eco retreat in Bali, and it could not be if it wanted to. What it has is a mountain spring, an ancient tree that got a vote on the floor plan, a waterfall the Balinese have prayed at for generations, and a view north across the sea from an open bamboo hall.
What it does not have is a short transfer, a nightlife, or anything to do after dark except look at stars and talk to whoever else made the drive.
Bumi Cinta means Earth Love. On the evidence of the water system, the tree and the village the staff come from, that reads less like branding and more like a standard someone has to keep meeting. Which is about the highest compliment you can pay a property in a market this full of signage.
