A family, an island, and a culture kept alive.
Palmento Grove Garifuna Cultural Healing Retreat sits on Kalipuna Island, on the north side of Hopkins Village in southern Belize — a private island retreat built to reflect a traditional Garifuna village, owned and run by the Martinez family.
A world away, twenty minutes from the highway.
The lodge sits among mangroves on the edge of Freshwater Creek Lagoon, where the lagoon meets the Caribbean. Footpaths run through the property. There are gardens where the plants are still grown to be used, a dock to fish from, and kayaks for the waterways.
Guests catch fish, pick vegetables from the garden, and learn to cook hudut — the Garifuna fish stew made with coconut and plantain — with drumming going on around them. Belize City is about two and a half hours away.
Cultural Experience of the Year.
Named Cultural Experience of the Year at the Belize Tourism Board’s 2025 National Tourism Awards. We take it as confirmation that culture shared honestly — not performed — is worth something.
Not a resort with a culture theme.
Garifuna owned and run
Owned and operated by a Garifuna family — an Afro-Caribbean people indigenous to Belize. Not a concession, not a performance troupe.
Rooted here since 2007
Working as a sustainable tourism business and a cultural preservation centre at the same time, since well before either was fashionable.
UNESCO recognised heritage
Garifuna language, dance and music are inscribed by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.
Cultural custodians
The family holds custodianship of a site significant to Garifuna history and to the history of Hopkins itself.
Empowering people by keeping the knowledge alive.
Palmento Grove exists to promote and preserve traditional Garifuna knowledge, history and way of life — and to make that preservation pay for itself, so it does not depend on anyone’s goodwill.
The money guests spend stays in the community that made the culture. The language is spoken here daily. The food is cooked the way it has always been cooked. And anyone who arrives carrying something heavy is given the room to set it down.
Before it was ours, it was already a landmark.
The island is known as Over Johnson. It is said to have first been home to three Ugandan women — and from them comes Yugada, the Garifuna name for Hopkins. Later a British businessman worked the farmland and took timber out of the rainforest in the Freshwater catchment; the area was known as Commerce Bight.
After a hurricane destroyed New Town, the Garifuna settlement to the north, the families living there were given permission by the state to move onto Over Johnson. The island proved too small for a population that size, and they moved again — to found what is now Hopkins Village.
The well they relied on is still here. It gave the only good drinking water for the Garifuna population in this locale, and it has stood for more than seventy years.
Preservation work that leaves the island.
Some of what guests spend here goes straight into this.
Eco-Cultural & Entrepreneurship Summer Camp
We sponsor the annual camp for local youths — language restoration, arts preservation and cultural wellness.
Come and see for yourself.
The best way to understand any of this is to sit down at the table.