Red against Caribbean blue, the campaign that photographs Tulum as one single world

Open light on the beach, then the enclosed dark of a cenote. The Faena Tulum campaign moves through four worlds in a single shoot, and the town itself is one of them.

The series was made for Faena Residences Tulum, the project Faena is developing in Tulum with the Mexican firm Inmobilia, and it was built on a simple decision. The cameras left the property.

Rafael Olarra, the creative director behind it, wanted the campaign to hold the place rather than the building. The beach, the town's streets, and the water of a cenote carry as much of the story as the project's own interiors, and the whole set was photographed by Pol Rodríguez with a crew of 10 on the call sheet.

Four locations, one journey through the same place

Olarra planned the session as a route rather than a list of setups. It begins with wide, luminous scenes on the sand, drops into the intimate, sensory register of the cenote, picks up the spontaneity and movement of Tulum pueblo, and resolves into the sophisticated, almost theatrical compositions of the showrooms.

Each stop shows a different face of the same place, which is exactly the point.

We wanted to move away from the most predictable image of Tulum as a plain beach destination and build a narrative that ran through its different layers.

Those layers are named in his own account of the work: the sea and its almost unreal light, the energy of the town, the thickness of the vegetation, the depth and mystery of the cenotes, and the Faena spaces understood as part of that same terrain rather than apart from it.

Red as the thread that ties the Faena Tulum campaign

One color carries the whole series. Red appears in fashion, objects, furniture, and small gestures within the frame, and it recurs often enough to serve as a connecting thread from the first image to the last.

Against the blues of the Caribbean, the greens of the jungle and the natural tones of the stone, that red produces what Olarra describes as a very Faena tension between nature, sensuality, fantasy and glamour.

The color has history here. When Faena and Inmobilia opened the Faena Collaboratory in Tulum on February 15, 2025, the room was built around Portal del Éter Rojo, an installation by the Argentine artist Pilar Zeta centered on a red fire egg, conceived as a reflection on transformation and on cycles of change. The campaign carries that same red out of the room and into the water.

Pol Rodríguez shot it, and Karla Mercedes produced it

The production was assembled with talent working in the destination, Inmobilia staff, and locations around town, according to Matías Carosio, brand and business developer at Inmobilia, who described the campaign to The Tulum Times as an international piece that shows Tulum from a more authentic, local angle.

The full credit list reads as follows.

• Creative direction, Rafa Olarra
• Photography, Pol Rodríguez, with Agustín Ponso as photo assistant
• Styling, Rosie Bonnar, with Luciana Abdenur assisting
• Hair and makeup, Malena Ibarra
• Production, Karla Mercedes
• Models, Flavia Eberhard, Dasha Ell and Ludovico Paulucci

The town as more than a beach

Tulum has been photographed from the air and from the sand for years, almost always from the same angle. A campaign that walks into the pueblo, stops in a cenote and treats a street as a legitimate location is doing something less common, and it arrives at a moment when the destination is working hard on how it presents itself abroad.

Carosio said the material is destined for internal channels and for tourism platforms promoting the destination, and that it has been circulating since September. Olarra's own summary of the intention explains why that use fits: rather than documenting Tulum, the campaign tries to transmit how it feels to be there, the freedom, the heat, the mystery and the almost surreal element that appears when nature and imagination meet.

147 residences, an art pavilion and a healing house

Behind the images sits one of the most closely watched projects on this coast. Faena Residences Tulum was unveiled in Tulum in February 2025 and presented in Mexico City days later, with Alan Faena, Roberto Kelleher of Inmobilia, architect Brandon Haw and Pilar Zeta on the program.

The masterplan brings together 147 residences designed by Haw, inspired by ancient Maya construction and finished in warm wood, chukum and rooftop gardens with infinity pools, an oceanfront hotel, an art pavilion, the Faena Ocean Club and Tierra Santa Healing House, a space devoted to treatments that combine contemporary and ancestral practices. As The Tulum Times reported in April, the strength of the plan is that it never rests on the apartments alone.

The name arrives with its own record. Alan Faena opened the Faena Hotel in Buenos Aires in 2004, with interiors by Philippe Starck, and the Faena Hotel Miami Beach inside the restored Saxony in November 2015. Tulum is the next district to carry it, and the first one where the brand had a jungle, a cenote, and a Caribbean shoreline to work with.

Which may be the real finding of the shoot. The red egg came first, in February 2025, inside the Collaboratory. Everything the campaign added to it was already outside, waiting in the water and in the street.

Which Tulum would you want the world to see, the beach or the town behind it? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.