Ubud

Ubud is Bali's cultural and wellness capital — rice terraces, temples, art markets, yoga studios and a long-established creative and expat community, sitting inland away from the beach-driven coastal development I track elsewhere on the island.

Ubud's growth has been shaped by wellness tourism, yoga retreats and its long-standing reputation as Bali's artistic and spiritual centre since the late 1960s, when artists began settling there — a positioning that predates the coastal boom by decades and has produced a different kind of built environment: boutique guesthouses and retreat centres integrated into rice-terrace landscapes rather than dense beach-club strips.

Ubud district has roughly 74,800 residents across about 42 square kilometres, and the central village alone receives an estimated 3 million-plus foreign visitors a year — many multiples of its resident population. It's widely regarded as Bali's main tourism hub outside the coast, and Ubud now ranks as the third most popular area on the island for new property projects, after Uluwatu and Canggu, with land prices already higher than most of the Bukit. That demand comes at a real cost to the surrounding landscape: the environmental organisation Walhi Bali estimates that 3 to 6 percent of farmland in Gianyar, Badung and Tabanan — the regencies around Ubud — is converted to commercial use every year, and Bali's governor has cited a province-wide loss of 600 to 700 hectares of productive agricultural land annually.