Home to matcha bars, padel courts and beach clubs, Canggu is the poster child for Bali’s digital nomad transformation, but overtourism has seen some ward visitors away from the area. Anna Moloney checked into Hotel Tugu, the first hotel opened in Canggu, and The Regent, the coastline’s new, five-star luxury resort, to see how the area is still changing

In Robert Frost’s well known poem The Road Not Taken, it is “the path less traveled” that is upheld as the superior choice for its speaker. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”

I can only imagine, then, the contempt with which Mr Frost would regard my decision  to holiday in Bali – the road very much well travelled by, especially by well-to-do westerners just like myself.

Indeed, the island is now so popular (the annual number of international visitors has climbed 173 per cent in the last decade, clocking in at just under 7m in 2025) that its previous evangelists (who visited on gap yahs 10 years ago and told us all how fabulous it was) are quickly distancing themselves, shrieking things like “Bali is dead!” as they hurry off to Borneo.

Within Bali itself though, we can narrow the road most travelled even further, with that most trampled path of all leading straight from Denpasar airport to Canggu. 

Located on the southwestern coast, Canggu, a once sleepy fisherman’s village, has become the island’s digital nomad HQ, overflowing with matcha bars, luxury villas and beach clubs. You may recognise it from Instagram, where ‘Bali reality versus expectations’ videos frequently showcase ‘nightmare scenes’ of thousands of tourists packed cheek to cheek at popular sunset spots. Alongside the wellness scene, and similarly to the Thai islands, some clubs are open eye-wateringly late, attracting young, twenty-something crowds intent on ‘finding themselves’ amid seas of neon body paint. And while it may only be 12 miles from the airport, but journey times can stretch anywhere between 45 minutes to over two hours due to the region’s infamous traffic, with the village’s small roads often left in gridlock.

Indeed, the consensus of almost all good online advice on how to “do Bali well” in 2026 is to avoid Canggu, so that’s where I went first. Alas, popularity has never been something to put me off a holiday (I hold the inane belief that popular things are popular because they are nice), and if you want to understand how dramatically the island has changed just in the last couple of decades, there is no better place to start. 

Tugu: The first hotel in Canggu

The development of Canggu has been swift, and unanticipated. 

The first ever hotel in the area, the now five-star Hotel Tugu Bali, where I checked in, was opened in 1997 by Anhar Setjadibrata, a former Indonesian medical student who was taken by the beauty of Canggu, then just rice paddies, temples and the white sand beach. Today it’s managed by his daughter, Lucienne Anhar, who told me they could never have expected Canggu to become what it is today.

“Almost overnight, it switched,” she told me, pinpointing the moment to somewhere around 2015. The people who have come have also changed, shifting from honeymooners and hippy surfers to those interested in what Lucienne calls the ‘new Canggu’ – great restaurants, cafes, padel and gyms: “I think there are more restaurants and cafes per m2 in Canggu than even NYC.”

Tugu though is decisively of the old Canggu, steeped in history not only as the area’s original guesthouse but in a literal sense too, as a self-defined ‘museum hotel’. Duly, around the hotel you’ll find genuine Indonesian artefacts collected by Lucienne’s father, who opened Tugu partially as a way of storing and exhibiting his pieces, from rare portraits of Indonesian royals to Ming vases rescued from historical shipwrecks. Even the main lobby, a massive wooden pagoda supported by at least a dozen pillars surrounding a towering statue of the Hindu god Garuda, is a 150-year-old sacred ceremonial hall transported from a village in central Bali, which makes for a striking hangout spot amongst the rows of new built, laptop-friendly cafes. The guest lodgings themselves take the form of wooden villas built in a traditional Javanese style, strung together by planked footpaths hung over lotus ponds. 

The hospitality is traditional too, by which I mean very, very good. When I checked in and realised I had booked my room for the wrong date (completely my fault), they changed my reservation fuss-free on the spot, and promptly moved on to press rice grains onto my forehead by way of a welcome blessing. They also offer a unique service in that you can have breakfast wherever you want on the property, with the Tugu staff happy to set up a table in your room, the main lobby, or along one of the garden pathways.

Just steps from the beach, Tugu also represents prime real estate, and Lucienne confirmed that many have tried to buy it to put “another high rise building there”. ‘High-rise’ in this case admittedly means only a few storeys though, with Canggu still strictly regulated by the island’s 50-year-old ‘coconut tree’ rule, which prohibits buildings from exceeding 15 metres in height.

The Regent Bali: The new rich kid on the block

Notably, while I was visiting, Tugu had recently acquired one such ‘high rise’ (four-storey) neighbour in the form of Regent Bali Canggu, a new mega luxury, five-star resort which is now the biggest hotel in Canggu. With room rates over double that of Tugu, it’s a unique arrival for the area both in scale and price point, signalling a departure from the affordable luxury (cheap massages, acai bowls) that has traditionally drawn tourists to the area. Lucienne said she welcomed the arrival, which she hopes will “elevate” Canggu’s image to something more “upscale”, a new, new Canggu perhaps moving on from its digi nomad residents, who some locals told me are already mass migrating to Lombok and Uluwatu.

Indeed, staying at the Regent next, I could almost feel my nose starting to tip upwards as I was immediately swept up in golf carts and warm towels.

It’s a resort that’s been a long time in the making, with planning starting around 2010, potentially crucial to its financial viability: according to Asia-based hospitality consultant Matt Gebbie who has led research into the Bali tourism boom, in Canggu “if you haven’t owned the land for a generation, you are too late”, with rates finally catching up to more accurately reflect the high quality product on offer. “Luxury offerings in Bali are now earning the rates they deserve.”

Duly, the Regent is plush and beautiful. It’s been thoughtfully designed in a kind of stacked formation that progresses downhill to the beach. If you stand at the top and look down your eyes will follow a beautiful symmetry of layered pools, lined with palm trees, that culminate in the sea crashing at the bottom. The sea in Canggu is not particularly suitable for swimming, so this prime pool real estate is a particular luxury of the resort.

So too is the spa. You can’t go to Bali without getting a massage but my one at the Regent was among the most memorable, taking place on a warm sand bed that tipped forward and back as you lay on it – slightly unsettling but you soon learn to trust the grip of the sand. The spa complex itself is thoughtfully designed to incorporate outside hanging wicker meditation pods. For me, the addition of Dyson hairdryers with diffusers (a rarity any fellow curly-haired travellers will know the gift of) particularly impressed.

Cure is the resort’s fine dining option, and you can watch the sunset over the beach as you enjoy the delicious nectar of chef Andrew Walsh, whose original Cure restaurant in Singapore was awarded a Michelin star. The food is inspired by Asian and European flavours, not least from Walsh’s Irish heritage, and I particularly enjoyed the absurdity of chomping down on Irish potato bread (brown-sugar crushed and dipped in a bacon and spring onion emulsion) while watching the Indonesian sun set. 

A new, new Canggu

Is Canggu done? Hardly. Yes the traffic and crowds and constant construction noise are real problems – especially for locals – but to write off the entire area as a fad that has been done is as reductive as the original mania that crowned it an undiscovered paradise in the first place. Yes the traffic is bad, but that’s because lots of people want to go there (because it’s fun!) and it’s especially worth a couple nights if the majority of your trip is going to be in Bali’s more spiritual pockets. Instead, Canggu is evolving once again, and the arrival of the Regent marks an interesting addition of resort-scale luxury. 

Personally, as I waved goodbye to the Regent on departure, sipping on the iced coffee packed for me by the staff on checkout, I thought back to the Robert Frost poem: if this is the path well travelled, god don’t take me off it. 

Rooms at Hotel Tugu Bali start from around £153 per night.

Rooms at Regent Bali Canggu start from £369 per night.