The most sustainable places to recharge your batteries – and salve your conscience .

Rarely is the environmental threat of simply living more starkly drawn than when we go on holiday. There is little point in denying the increased size of our carbon footprint when we plod on to planes and through the air-conditioned corridors of vast hotels.

But if mitigation is the goal while climate change and environmental destruction grip the globe, there is much to cheer in the current – and belated – wave of hotels designed and built with a conscience, where eco and luxe can co-exist like their inhabitants and the nature beyond their (well-insulated, sustainably built) walls.

From replanting schemes to turtle hatcheries, rare species of marsupial and menus made from banana fibres, the following selection of eco-hotels leaves a minimal mark on some of the world’s most precious landscapes. After all, real luxury should be about allowing nature to make its mark on you.

The bullet train that conveys guests from the maelstrom of Tokyo northwest to Hoshinoya Karuizawa might as well be a teleporter for the change of scene it offers in less than an hour. The modern Onsen resort lies amid the second homes and studios of artists and royalty, who for generations have retreated in the summer from the Japanese capital to the cool, forested banks of the Yukawa River.

The Asama volcano overlooks the resort, and is more active than many guests choose to be. But there is more to do at Karuizawa than lie back in the meditation bath, set in a womb-like cavern, or read on the terrace of your sustainably built lakeside cottage, which is warmed naturally by the hot spring itself, rather than drawing on the power grid.

Just outside the resort, where songbirds gather amid the spring cherry blossom, autumn leaves or winter snow, Tombo-no-yu hot spring is reserved for guests each morning before it opens to the public. At Picchio, a non-profit wildlife reserve, flying squirrels launch themselves from their nests at sunset, and the resort can arrange guided tours of its birdlife or horse rides on the flanks of Asama. Anything more strenuous would be indecent.

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The Balearic cognoscenti have quietly revelled in “the other side of Ibiza” for almost as long as the island has been a byword for excess. The White Isle has always been bigger than its pulsing club heartlands of Ibiza Town and San Antonio, but few of its more laid-back locales rival the green and serene credentials of La Granja. The sprawling 16th-century farmstead of pine and citrus forests, set in the island’s rolling inlands, has been transformed into a members-only retreat (joining is a formality) by Design Hotels with Friends Of A Farmer, an agricultural movement with arty pretensions.

Owing more to Ibiza’s previous life as a 1970s hippy hangout, the rustic-luxe hideaway comprises a nine-bedroom farmhouse, two-bedroom standalone guesthouse behind thick, cooling walls and a pool that looks out over the terraced fields. The hotel’s master farmer and head chef use its produce to create meals without menus. They also make good use of the island’s fish markets.

La Granja works with the Ibiza Preservation Fund to help safeguard the island’s natural and agricultural heritage and offers guests biodynamic farming and slow-food workshops as well as yoga and lectures inside its traditional Bedouin tent. And, should your feet unexpectedly twitch in the early hours, Amnesia is just a 15-minute taxi ride away.

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Deep inside South Africa’s northernmost Limpopo Province, named after the “grey-green, greasy” river of Mr Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, the Waterberg massif had been overlooked among the region’s great safari wildernesses. Once the natural laboratory of Mr Eugène Marais, a morphine-addicted South African poet and lawyer turned pioneering naturalist, it regained its place on the map in the 1990s with the creation of the Marakele National Park, a vast reserve in which the luxury Marataba Safari and Trails Lodges have a private concession. The Marataba Trails Lodges’ five deluxe eco suites are solar powered and open onto verandas with sweeping views of the lush river below and the escarpment across the forest. The central lodge provides the communal areas and a pool looking over the towering cycads and cedars, home to large colonies of birds, including more than 800 breeding pairs of Cape vultures. At ground level, game tours in the lodge’s open-top four-by-fours, or on foot, offer reliable sightings of resurgent populations of big cats, elephants and rhinos of both varieties. The lodge is totally off-grid and is built from local materials.

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When it opened on the site of a former caravan park on Tasmania’s mountainous east coast in 2010, the Saffire Freycinet shook up Australia’s luxury lodge market with new levels of service and cooking. From above it looks like a giant silver beached stingray, but the unapologetically modern collection of 20 suites, linked via walkway to the main lodge, still scoops up awards and draws travellers from Melbourne and Sydney on the mainland via its own lounge at Hobart Airport.

The energy-efficient lodge is now blending into the granite Hazards mountains behind it and the ocean views across Coles Bay as more than 30,000 native plants reach maturity in its protected grounds. The hotel is dedicated to sustainability and does everything from limiting light pollution to composting to conserving rainwater. Beyond it, Freycinet National Park, named after the young 19th-century French explorer Mr Louis de Freycinet, includes the famous beach at Wineglass Bay, as well as native species of possum and the lesser-known long-nosed potoroo.

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From a distance, the tower lodge at Tri looks like an oddly well-constructed treehouse or twitchers’ hide, nestled on a hillside among banyans and frangipani, above Lake Koggala. Inside, the eco-resort close to Sri Lanka’s south coast expands across six acres to include 11 suites, all but three of them villas set down the hill in a sustainable spiral of recycled jackwood and granite, its layout inspired by the Fibonacci sequence. British entrepreneur and photographer Mr Robert Drummond and his yoga-coach wife Ms Laura Baumann are the brains behind the project, which opened in 2015. Designed not only to disappear into the forest, it is also made of it, right down to the menus woven in banana fibres and the blinds made from cinnamon wood.

Yoga in the tree-top, open-sided studio is as demanding as life gets at the lodge, while the historic beachfront city of Galle Fort is a short trundle away and, at the right time of year, guests can help release sea turtles at the Koggala Sea Turtle Hatchery. Tri’s staff can also point out the most secluded stretches of sand on the island’s tropical south coast.

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For all their dependence on the natural spectacle of the mountains, ski resorts and their hotels can rarely claim to do much but exploit their settings, an ecological imbalance that tends to get worse as they get plusher. Whitepod set out to challenge that with 15 geodesic domes that blend into a hillside meadow on the Swiss-French border in the Alps.

Resembling giant eyeballs, they peer out through vast windows over private decks to views across the Rhone Valley down to the Montreux end of Lake Geneva. Inside, wood-burning stoves warm the cosy pine and sheepskin interiors, and family pods have mezzanine levels for children. In winter, snow shoes are supplied for navigating the hillside and the short hike to the main house where Les Cerniers restaurant serves refined traditional Swiss Alpine fare (think Valais charcuterie and melted cheese in various forms). Locally sourced spring water and biodegradable cleaning and paper products further minimise the hotel’s environmental footprint.

Whitepod’s private slopes are perfect for family skiing far beyond the crowds, while the vast Portes du Soleil area is less than half an hour away. In the summer, mountain bikes and wild-plant-cooking classes can be arranged, or you can rise above it all with the birds under a paraglider.

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There aren’t many bodies of water with a view that could rival the infinity pool at the Tierra, a hotel and architectural statement on the shores of Lake Sarmiento in Chilean Patagonia. Across the bright-blue waters of the lake itself, the snow-capped towers of the Torres del Paine massif punch into the sky like great granite fists.

The work of Chilean architect Ms Cazú Zegers, the hotel is arranged in a gentle S shape – part sleeping snake, part elegantly shaped driftwood – all of it clad in washed lenga wood with a silvery finish that does little to distract attention from the landscape. During construction, all the vegetation on the site was preserved to be replanted around the building, which is now frequented by guanacos (similar to llamas) and ostrich-like flightless birds called ñandús.

For more of the region’s natural wonders, the entrance to the Torres del Paine National Park and its infinite hiking and gawping opportunities is just 15 minutes away.

Inside, acres of understated wood and towering windows enclose one of South America’s finest hotels, but none of it rivals the views, which are framed and brought into the building in every room and across the communal spaces, including the elegant central restaurant.

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