You’ll find plenty of free and paid activities at Ventana Big Sur. We’ll spend some time walking you through everything we did along with our thoughts.

View other posts in this series:

• Simply Spectacular: The Immaculate Alila Ventana Big Sur
• Enjoying Breakfast at the Alila Ventana Big Sur
• Satisfying Lunch at the Alila Ventana Big Sur
• Delicious Dinner at the Alila Ventana Big Sur
• Alila Ventana’s NYE Dinner at The Sur House: Absolutely Delicious
• The Paid and Free Activities at Ventana Big Sur (this post)
• Comparing Miraval Berkshires With Alila Ventana: Which Is Better?

Before we dive into the activities at Ventana, if you’re already at the property and wanted to know the schedule for the week, just stop by the front desk and you’ll find it all up on display.

The hotel features

Before we get into anything that requires a reservation, let’s first touch on the features of the hotel that can be used at any time.

The Social House

Over by the front desk is the social aspect of The Social House. Here you’ll find a billiards table and plenty of board games.

Despite there only being one table, it wasn’t in use all that much. But, hey, that works for us–I don’t mind beating Jenn any day of the week.

There were also a couple of tables that worked for playing a game of chess or one of many board games.

One of our nightly activities was to stop by The Social House and play Scrabble to give our bodies some time to digest before sleeping.

The pools

There are a total of four public pools at the Ventana Big Sur. Two of them are by the poolside lunch restaurant, while the other two are a bit further away. You’ll want to bring your own sandals as the hotel doesn’t provide anything durable (just cardboard slippers that disintegrate after one use). But the hotel does provide sunscreen.

The pool we enjoyed the most was the Meadow Pool, which is the closest pool to the lunch restaurant. It’s modestly warm, but it was also the end of December and naturally on the colder side once you got out of the pool.

The Infinity Hot Tub was a popular option. You get an excellent view of the forest surrounding the hotel from this pool. We enjoyed cozying up to the edge and listening to the water running down the side of the infinity pool. As you’d expect, this one is plenty hot.

Up near the fitness center is the Mountain Pool. This one is clothing optional. There is more privacy, but it also seemed to be less popular than the other two pools already mentioned. The Mountain Pool is similar to the Meadow Pool in terms of how modestly heated it is.

The last pool is the Japanese Hot Bath, which has separate changing areas for men and women but the pool is shared. As with the Mountain Pool, clothing is optional here. It’s as hot as a hot tub in here, with plenty of partitioned rooms in between the changing rooms. We didn’t spend much time in here simply because there are no views and we preferred just going back to our room to use the hot tub there.

Fitness Center

There is a fitness center on site, with a good variety of equipment. You’ll find cardio and free weights. We hardly found anyone use the fitness center. I want to say it’s because most people preferred to do some hikes around the property or activities at Ventana to get their cardio. At least, that was our excuse not to spend time here.

Spa

If you want any paid services, the spa is right near the Meadow Pool. We debated putting in a reservation for it, but ultimately decided against it. It wasn’t a bad choice: just being here is relaxing and I don’t think it’s all that comfortable if you’re lying on an extremely full stomach.

The free activities at Ventana Big Sur

If you want to do any free or paid activities at Ventana, you’ll need to make a reservation. The hotel will reach out to you before arrival to ask what time you prefer dinner each night and provide you with a website for you to book activities. You’ll need a special code from the hotel to make your reservation, so don’t bother making plans before they reach out to you.

Forest bathing

The forest bathing activity is best for your first morning on property, as it gave a good overview of the walking trails. We met at The Library (which seemed more like a yoga studio than an actual library) at around 8AM. Chris led this activity, who taught us a bit of the history of the practice of forest bathing (from Japan).

Along the journey, we walked by two active beehives. Since it was only 47°F in the morning, there wasn’t much buzzing.

We ventured a bit deeper along the path, with our main destination being the Circle of Life. That is the name given to a giant redwood with about 20 offshoots that make you feel surrounded by trees, but really it’s just the same tree.

Somehow just being inside the trees dampens all sound from the outside, making it feel very serene and peaceful. We remained here for a few minutes just soaking in nature, which was very much needed.

In all, we spent about 35 minutes on the tour. It’s a calming, refreshing tour, but I feel like I wouldn’t get use from doing it multiple times. We did come back to the Circle of Life on our own a separate time once we knew where it was.

Forager’s hike

We had Katie leading us on the forager’s hike around the Ventana Big Sur property, who admitted she was subbing in for someone else. She also let us know that about 40% of Ventana guests are from Northern California, about 30% are from Southern California, and about 30% from elsewhere. We met up for this one at noon by the fitness center.

While this activity is listed as a hike, it’s more like a stroll than anything else. Katie handed out some laminated guides to help identify the different flora around the property. Much of the biodiversity isn’t natural to the region and instead the original owner planted it back in 1975.

Katie spent a lot of time talking in great detail about each of the different plants we walked by. This included allowing us to sample some of the fruits or leaves that were safe to consume. The hotel restaurant sources some of the food used at dinner from the plants around the property.

She pointed out to us which trees would likely need to be taken down due to diseases like sudden oak death (SOD) fungus.

And lastly she showed us an example of the polypore mushroom, which has taken over some of the bay trees, hollowing them out and leaving them easy to fall. Apparently you can eat the polypore mushroom but it doesn’t taste all that great.

Jenn and I enjoyed this 50 minute tour around the property. You end up walking around a similar path as the forest bathing excursion, but the focus is different. Learning more about what is edible and what isn’t is a skill I’ve wanted to acquire and this tour helped in that regard. We’d recommend this one and it was one of the more memorable activities at Ventana for us.

Coast ridge hike

Once again, Chris led us on another hike, but this coast ridge hike was a bit more strenuous. It’s a three mile roundtrip hike with some elevation to it, lasting about 90 minutes. The website suggested you wear shoes with big treads, but we didn’t find it necessary; simple walking shoes seemed satisfactory. Be sure to bring water on this trip.

The main star of the show is the biodiversity of Big Sur. First, you’ll start by walking up Coast Ridge road (pay attention to passing cars as it’s a public road). Unfortunately, you can’t walk the whole road because there are private houses you can’t get around at some point. Back before Highway 1 existed, this road was the only way to access Big Sur, so there is a lot of history with this road.

Do be careful where you walk because there was at least one wire exposed that caused Jenn to trip.

As you climb the road, you’ll get progressively higher vantage points to stop and take a look around.

There’s also a house along the way that has never been occupied. A shame, really, but the house is a bit out of my price range. We did hear a caretaker vacuuming the house as we walked by it.

The views continued to get a bit more magnificent as we continued to climb.

You’ll eventually come across a nice waterfall that Alila Ventana Big Sur uses to supply all the water for guests to use when it’s flowing. When it’s dry, the hotel instead uses wells.

That waterfall is pretty much the end of the lush green environment and cool weather. The marine layer stops right around that point and everything above gets little water. The trail becomes rather barren and more prone to fires. It’s simply remarkable to see that dramatic a change in the scenery. Oh, and don’t be walking in the shrubs or you’ll run the risk of picking up a tick or two.

It’s a good idea to bring binoculars for this hike. Way off in the distance is where you’ll see the lighthouse on a clear day. This is also the end of the tour. You can either continue on from here on your own (but must turn around to come back at some point) or you can head back with the guide. We decided to call it a day.

On the hike down, we took a little bit of a quicker path to the starting point and passed by the hotel’s giant water storage tanks. This area is called ‘housekeeping hill’ and the road is surprisingly steep around here. They’ve never fully used up a tank of water before and they never draw water from the city. Pretty neat!

This was an awesome hike and more of what we were expecting for awesome hikes through the wilderness. Definitely recommend it to anyone looking to get some exercise.

The paid activities at Ventana

I want to quickly point out that we unfortunately didn’t get a chance to pay for any activities at Ventana. Why not? Because for the days we were here, we didn’t get to choose between any activities that interested us. That’s really a shame, because I would have loved the falconry activity, the bees, or the knife crafting experiences. It truly was just poor luck with timing on our part.

By the time we took the last hike, we learned that the soap making activity was actually one of the better options at the hotel. That wasn’t one that caught our eye before coming, but sadly it was all booked up by the time we heard that we should. Ah well.

We did walk by the axe throwing happy hour activity a couple of times on the way to The Sur House. It seemed… fine. But I’d rather not pay money just to throw axes. I got my own axes at home I can throw. 😉

If you have flexibility on dates, I’d recommend checking out their link to get a sense of what activities at Ventana might be available when you come.

Overall, the activities at Ventana that we did try out were awesome and allowed us to disconnect from our normal lives. The Alila Ventana Big Sur is truly a world-class property that everyone should check out at some point.