If you’ve been reading the blog or following me on Instagram, you’ll know that I’ve been trying to get in touch with my inner waterbaby this summer – I’m building up my kayaking skills and confidence, in part through wild swimming, and I swim a mile twice a week in my local outdoor pool. But as well as the sea and the lido, I love a spa and so today I’m going to talk about my evening at Aqua Sana at Longleat last Tuesday – this blog was scheduled for Thursday when it was still fresh but then, you know, an eruption started.
Back in 2019, I went to Senspa in the New Forest and decided this was a thing I was going to treat myself to every year. You all know what happened next. Didn’t get there in 2020, funnily enough! And by the time I got to looking at it again, a 5-9pm evening spa had gone from four hours of hot water and steam rooms for £69 to two hours of spa access and a two-course meal I don’t in the least want for – get this! – £179!
But then Brogan Tate went to Aqua Sana at Longleat for her birthday earlier in the year and made a video about it. I’ve been a Longleat annual pass holder and I had no idea there was a spa there. Turns out that’s because it’s buried right down at the far end of Center Parcs rather than at the big house. I’ve looked at Center Parcs before but a weekend an hour up the road even in low season costs more than a month in Iceland would, so I’ve never looked any deeper and discovered that there’s a spa which non-residents can visit.
So for my birthday, I booked me a £95 Twilight Spa, which is more expensive than I would have liked but you do get the full three and a half hours in the spa, with fluffy robes and towels and it was my birthday (well, not actually on the Tuesday) and my first spa in three years (she says as if she won’t have a winter spa booked by the time this is published!).
I only took one picture: this one, of me looking damp and well-steamed afterwards. All the others have been borrowed from Aqua Sana’s own website. I don’t do it often but I wanted to talk about the spa and it really needs some pictures and obviously, you don’t get to take a camera inside!
Aqua Sana is something of a chain, it turns out. I’ve looked at the one in Sherwood Forest and it’s so weird, it’s like it’s exactly the same spa with exactly the same rooms but shuffled around to fit the precise space they happened to have there. Elvedon and Whinfell also appear to be twins, although different to the Longleat/Sherwood twins and then Woburn is a little different.
My first draft went into painful detail about the 24 spa experiences so I’ll spare you some of that. You get an electronic bracelet that controls your locker, a fluffy robe and towel (which a member of staff “will sort out for you” when it gets too wet to use) and a glass of Prosecco or orange juice on arrival, which you can drink out of a real glass in the cafe or take into the spa in a paper cup. My first stop was at Sole Therapy, which is a room with lots of foot baths (that, frankly, look like oversized toilets). You sit on the nice comfy benches, put your feet in, press the button to start and it fills with hot water and bubbles. When the light goes out, you can press the button again to start the bubbles again but the water does cool rapidly and you’ll need to wait for it to drain and refill if you want more hot water. I liked Sole Therapy a lot! I sprained my right ankle two and a half weeks ago and it’s still not 100% back to normal, and I currently have a very tired, sore and aching right heel, not to mention that my feet are a bit on the filthy side from living in sandals, so getting them clean was an excellent start to the spa. I know it’s the sort of thing people use once and then put in a cupboard but I could really fancy one of those footbaths. Sit at my desk with my feet soaking and bubbling away. Nice.
There are four or five zones – five, I think – which generally feature somewhere to sweat, somewhere to shower and somewhere to relax. The Volcanic and Nordic Forests are on your right and left as you come into the central area, then there’s an outdoor pool in the centre and the other three zones are arranged in a circle around them.
Some favourites: well, I’m a simple soul. Paint something black and put red lights in it and name it something with the word volcano and I’m going to love it. I sat in the Lava Sauna, which has its back wall painted black and a mix of black and transparent crystals embedded in the wall, with red lights and red LED strips under its tiered pale wood benches and I liked that a lot. However, it has a glass wall so you can see out and directly oppsite, I could see straight into the Nordic Sauna which is basically identical except its walls and lights are white and because the outer wall is a window onto the pine forest, it’s so light and airy in there you can’t tell that it has lights at all. Two identical saunas with some superficial differences in decor and yet which of the two did I come back to?
It was the same with the steam rooms. The Volcanic Steam Room is tiled in tiny black mosaic tiles and there’s a red light. The Alpine Steam Room is tiled in tiny white mosaic tiles and there are blue and green LED strips and a large amethyst geode. The Salt Steam Room is also tiled in tiny black mosaic tiles but it has green lighting and glass panels showing miniature bamboo gardens. The Moonlight Steam Room is also tiled in black but it has a huge blue light in the ceiling and a kind of octagonal table that you can put your feet up on. I admit, the Forest Glade Steam Room is different – it has a shiny plastic-coated mural of a forest and sunburst and instead of sitting on tiled benches, you sit on “tree stumps” with a resin top that’s just a tiny bit bigger than the stump so that it digs into your legs. It’s also not as steamy. Of the five, I probably came back to the Salt Steam Room most often but I think that’s because the Hot Springs zone, which it belongs to, also has the hot tubs. Sorry, the Hot Springs Garden. That means some recliners, some egg chairs and two hot tubs.
I love a hot tub! When I have a house, I’m having a hot tub. I mean, in a dream world where I can afford a house. In that same dream world, I’d have a shed of some kind that contains a sauna or steam room or preferably both. An experience shower is then a simple matter of installing a shower and some drainage and adding some LEDs around the head. Keep a few robes in a cupboard somewhere and not only do I have my own mini spa, I also suddenly have a lot of visitors who might not come and see me so often otherwise. Honestly, I think the hot tubs were my favourite bit.
One room that’s unique to the Longleat spa is the Forest Cavern, which is a tepidarium – a warm but fairly dry room designed as a cave, with “stone” walls and ceiling and even a hole in the ceiling with plants growing around it and green lights which genuinely does look quite convincingly like an entrance to a real cave, if not for the glass across the top to keep the rain and wildlife out. It has six heated double recliners and my fellow cave-wallowers swore that showers sprinkled over you if you sat on the left of the recliner and waited long enough. Yes, there were shower heads overhead but I think they’re emergency fire sprinklers and if they’re raining on you, you should probably be running for your life.
The experience showers got a bit samey. Again, they’re all themed differently, from the forest ones that had murals to the black tiles in the volcanic one but there’s only so many times you can press a button for “Tropical Storm”, “Caribbean Storm”, “Cold Mist”, “Glacial Shower” and still find them a different experience. The only one that is genuinely different is the Forest Rain Walk in the Nordic Forest where the showers are operated by yanking a rope rather than pressing a button and instead of it being one shower that does four different things, it’s three showers that each do one different thing – a cold mist, a freezing cascade and a big warm hotel-style waterfall shower.
In the centre of it all is the outdoor pool, which is circular and just big and deep enough that you can swim a few strokes. Using Google Maps to measure isn’t the most accurate thing you can do but it seems to be just under seven metres in diameter. It has underwater benches at the opposite side to the steps and every five or so minutes, it bubbles and you get a cool jacuzzi effect for a while. I always like a swimming pool, even a small one, and even more if it’s outside so this is probably where I spent the most time but I’m aware I go to a pool twice a week and I did try to keep returning to saunas and steam rooms and showers and I went into Nordic Forest’s Ice Cave and tried to do the hot-cold thing by rubbing ice on myself. The trouble with that is that you really need a pair of gloves, otherwise your hands go numb before the rest of you has really registered the ice.
My criticisms are small: I’d personally have a hydrotherapy pool with lots of bubbles and interesting things to sit on instead of one of the zones. There are too many places to relax and not enough places to soak. The towel and robe do get drenched pretty quickly but apparently all you have to do is ask for dry ones. And when you come out of the spa with your brain on pause and your body delirious from heat and cold and relaxing and pineapple juice, the drive home is a bit of an abrupt change of gear. I know, stay at Center Parcs or stay at the spa itself and then you don’t have to drive straight home. But those are expensive!
Equally small things I liked: pineapple juice on tap. Numbers on the pegs next to each experience so you could keep track of which is your towel. Not sure if the semi-paper bags for storing your towel and robe were really necessary but they did seem to have name tags on so you could be absolutely certain this was your towel and no one else’s. The Forest Meditation was very nice. Love anything volcanic. Love hot tubs. Liked the novelty of the rope-pull showers. Everything was very clean and shiny and nothing looked old or worn or tired.
As I said, I want to go back in winter. I want to see what it looks like when it’s dark outside all those light airy rooms with huge windows. I want to sit in a hot tub with a cold breeze around my ears. I want to enjoy the outdoor pool when it’s dark and chilly. I think the whole spa experience will be different in winter and I think it’ll suit me better than sitting in the hot tub half-wishing I hadn’t left my sunglasses in the car.