Most spas are judged by what’s on the treatment menu. At Nekupe, the more telling detail is what happened before any guest ever booked a treatment. Nekupe Spas sits open-air, built into the reserve rather than added onto it: a salt room, a steam room, mountaintop treatment areas open to the surrounding forest, and a spa café.

Trained personally, before a single guest arrived

Before the spa ever opened, Nekupe’s founders trained each masseuse themselves, not through a standard onboarding process, but hands-on, to make sure every technique used on the property met a standard they’d set personally.

They didn’t stop there. A globally renowned holistic wellness expert was flown in for an intensive training program, working directly with Nekupe’s Nicaraguan masseuses to sharpen their technique and introduce the latest approaches in wellness massage. The result is a team trained not just to perform a treatment, but to understand why it works.

Detail, all the way down

The design of Nekupe’s spa gets noticed immediately:  the materials, the setting, the way it opens onto the forest instead of closing itself off from it. What’s harder to see, and just as intentional, is the level of training behind every set of hands a guest encounters there. From the architecture to the technique, Nekupe’s spa reflects the same principle the whole reserve was built on: nothing here happened by accident.

Nekupe is a private reserve on Nicaragua’s Pacific coast, built around wilderness, privacy, and a level of personalization few properties attempt.