Is Bali dead? I checked into Canggu’s oldest and newest luxury hotels to find out

Canggu has become a symbol of Bali’s rapid growth in tourism, with traffic, crowds and nightlife prompting some visitors to declare the island “dead”. Anna Moloney visits the area’s first hotel and its newest luxury resort to explore how Canggu has changed and whether it still offers a worthwhile holiday.

Bali welcomed just under 7 million international visitors in 2025, 173 per cent more than a decade earlier. Hotel Tugu opened in Canggu in 1997, when the area was mostly rice paddies, temples and beaches; its manager says the transformation accelerated around 2015, as visitors increasingly came for restaurants, cafés, padel and gyms.