El Cosmico travel tips

In the dusty desert of Marfa, Texas, hotel and campground El Cosmico serves as an eclectic respite in Far West Texas.

Every other year since 2014, I go glamorous camping — or glamping — in Marfa, a town in the high desert of West Texas surrounded by mountains.

Get ready to blast off to a new frontier of luxury glamping, as El Cosmico’s Martian-inspired retreat is coming to Texas.

El Cosmico, in Marfa, Texas, has been synonymous with a free-form lodging experience and a place where art and counterculture combine with high desert hospitality. A campground-meets-hotel, the property has grown from the imaginative vision of Texas-based hotelier Liz Lambert. Through the years, it has attracted wanderers seeking a confluence of the extraordinary and the rustic, the real and the surreal.

Big Bend National Park shares a border with Mexico in a stunning stretch of southwestern Texas, where evenings are defined by orange skies reflecting against red-rock canyons.  While such stunning scenes are commonplace within Big Bend, the massive desert preserve remains overlooked among US national parks. It’s never had more than 500,000 visitors in a single year since it was made a national park in 1944, making it one of the least-visited parks in the lower 48.