“Are you going to the spa in Bucharest sometime?” It was just a comment on someone else’s Instagram, left over a year ago, on a post I shouldn’t even have been stalking but it set it all into motion. From the moment Therme București shoved its way into my consciousness, the biggest spa in Europe, the viral one everyone was flocking to, we all knew I was going to end up there eventually. Plus I had some unfinished business with Bucharest that I knew I was going to have to deal with eventually, so I opened up my calendar and counted up the annual leave I had left – a bit tricky when our app still thinks I only work two days a week and my boss had promised we’d have a look at it and fix it (and the day after I booked all this, he did) and the long and the short is that on the Monday of October half term, there I was, standing outside the door with a drybag and a pair of clean pool shoes.
And then within twenty minutes of walking out into the pool area, I decided it was hugely overrated! Eight hours of bathing, relaxing and sweating made me start to reconsider that so let’s decide whether it is or not by looking at the good, the bad and the weird.
The good
Therme București is very big! It has three separate areas, each more exclusive than the last and whichever tier you go for, you get everything in the lower tiers included. Galaxy is the fun area with all the slides and the wave pool, The Palm is a quieter, more relaxing area and Elysium is the premium zone with all the saunas and the fine dining restaurant.
For the size of it and what’s on offer, it’s incredibly good value, which is why people find it’s often worth adding the price of a return flight just for a day here. It’s 197 lei, about £34, for a whole day with Galaxy, Palm and Elysium included but it starts at 67 lei, £12, for a 3 hour Galaxy-only ticket
It’s easily accessible by public transport. If you’re in the north of Bucharest, you can get the bus 442 (just scan your bank card/phone on the orange reader to pay) direct from Piața Presei Libere or if you’re coming straight from the airport, you can get the bus from the bus stop outside Departures. It takes about 10 minutes from the airport. As I wasn’t in the north of Bucharest and would need to change anyway to get to Piața Presei Libere, I took the direct airport train and hopped on the bus there. The bus is 3 lei for 90 minutes, including transfers during that time whereas the train is 6 lei, so I spent three times as much as I could have done but on the other hand, £1.55 each way is not exactly a bank-breaker. On the other hand, it’ll take 50-60 minutes by bus from Piața Presei Libere so if you’re starting closer to Gara de Nord, it’s a lot quicker to take the train to the airport – Google Maps reckons I save at least 25 minutes by taking the train from my hotel instead of two buses.
You get a wristband for your own numbered locker, so it’s a case of finding the right number rather than finding one that’s available. You can open and close it as many times as you like and if you move your bag in the right place, it activates a motion sensor that switches on a bank of LEDs so you can actually see what you’re looking for in the locker. Even-numbered lockers are at the top, odd-numbered at the bottom, in case you have a preference and need to request a change when you arrive – they just hand you a random wristband from a box, there’s no logic or order to it.
The wristband is also your credit card for buying drinks and food in the various cafes, restaurants and in-water bars – every zone has its own in-water bar with alcoholic and non-alcoholic options. Elysium also has a sort of cafe-lounge where you can get smoothies from a machine and flavoured waters and sit on dry seats, if there are any left.
There’s a restaurant in every zone. Galaxy has the Greens Restaurant, by far the most family-friendly. The Palm has the Humboldt Restaurant and Elysium has the Mango Tree Restaurant, which is the kind of fine-dining that requires you to wear a robe, and apparently not the robe you’ve been wearing around the therme all day (they apparently give you a suitable robe to wear during your meal, so you don’t need to have hired a robe for the day). The Humboldt also has a takeaway counter, the Vitamin Bar, where you can order snacks from a machine (it speaks English or Romanian) and then collect them when your number is called – I opted for a scoop of chocolate ice cream but it also does an assortment of pastries and cakes and hot & cold drinks.
If you don’t want to take all the necessaries (swimsuit, towel, flipflops), you can rent them at the therme. Particularly handy if you’re doing an extreme day trip on a budget airline with nothing but a personal item.
It has both indoor and outdoor pools. A lot of the outdoor beach areas are closed outside of the summer season but the small outdoor pools connected to the inside ones stay open, although their in-water bars don’t.
The main pool in The Palm is exactly as beautiful as the pictures you see on Instagram, a bright blue pool surrounded by flowers and palm trees set in a big greenhouse. After dark, they light it up and it feels like a party.
The saunas in the Elysium zone are all very different in both vibe and temperature. The Bavaria is by far the hottest inside and Himalaya is the coolest, so there’s a sauna for everyone. They also run “events” in the saunas throughout the day, things like particular scents or tea bathing – these are listed on the board outside each sauna but there are also screens throughout the therme telling you what events are on in every zone.
You need to sit on a towel in the saunas (staff will pop in and correct every little error in sauna etiquette) but there are drying racks in the relaxing areas in Galaxy and Palm where you can hang your towel over a gentle breeze so that you can use it later for its intended purpose. Take two towels if your luggage allowance allows.
Every zone has an outdoor sunbathing area, even in winter and the Elysium’s is a terrace overlooking the countryside beyond the therme. In October, it’s also a great way to cool off after a sauna – not as hygienic as a shower but it feels nice to stand in the open air.
The entire place has free wifi.
The bad
It’s not a spa. I knew that going on, so that’s not a surprise. It’s a therme, which is something we don’t really have in English but from my experience of them in Germany and Poland, it’s a kind of waterpark with an optional adults-only sauna area attached. Don’t go expecting tranquillity and whale music here.
The queues at 10am when it opens are unbelievable. You think arriving early is beating the crowds but actually, you are the crowds. I’d aim for 11am next time and by the time you’ve stood in a queue and then fought your way through the changing rooms, you’re probably not going to get into the water more than about ten minutes later for arriving an hour later. I may have just got unlucky – it was UK half term because I have to fit these longer trips around Brownies and Rangers, so maybe it was a Romanian school holiday too but it was a Monday morning in October so I dread to think how busy this place is on summer weekends.
There are nowhere near enough changing cubicles for the number of people in the Elysium changing rooms and they’re an absolute labyrinth. The first time I went back to my locker, I walked down the wrong aisle of lockers twice in a row. I didn’t see the Galaxy changing rooms but you walk through The Palm to get to the pool and they seemed to have a slightly better proportion – I didn’t see hordes of people clutching towels and waiting for a cubicle once in Palm, whereas that was what was happening pretty much every time I went back to Elysium.
There are nowhere near enough toilets. You access the pools via a shower & toilet room from the locker rooms, divided down the middle into women on one side and men on the other but there’s always a queue for the two toilets down the women’s side so you have to bypass that by walking past the men’s showers. You can’t see anything in the showers and Romania absolutely doesn’t have a culture of nakedness anyway but nonetheless, you will run into impassable queues in the showers.
Every sun lounger and comfortable round bed has a pile of towels and books on it by 10.15 in the morning. Arrive any later, and you’re not getting to sit anywhere. The rules say that if you leave your stuff unsupervised for too long, staff will remove it but I didn’t see that happening.
It’s just generally really busy. Someone on another blog said it’s like Disneyland and yeah, you need to think more water-themed theme park than oasis of calm, even in the Palm and Elysium areas. If you’re heading up the stairs to the Elysium zone, I guarantee you will crash into someone staging a mini photoshoot on the little landing halfway up, the infra-red beds and massage beds will be permanently occupied and the queues at the in-water bars are at least three deep all day.
The Galaxy zone echoes with shrieking children. Not being a fan of slides, and there being a better outdoor pool at The Palm, I didn’t spend a lot of time there.
Therme București may be big but if you’re after a spa-like experience, the Galaxy zone occupies at least half the floorspace, so if you’re avoiding shrieking children and slides and wave pools, suddenly it really doesn’t feel like the biggest spa in Europe.
Despite Elysium being the premium area, it’s by far the busiest, which I assume is because it’s relatively tiny and a lot of people feel like it’s worth the £5 for a full day to upgrade from Galaxy + Palm to be able to access all areas.
The in-water bar in Elysium is in the selenium and zinc pool, which means it’s absolutely impossible to properly relax and enjoy the mineral water.
They try to sell The Palm as an “adults-only oasis”, except that by “adult”, they mean children under 3 and anyone over 14, so you’re in this beautiful pool with drooling, screaming infants wearing swim nappies (which are horrifying; they contain no liquids) and teenagers messing around. The babies at least aren’t allowed in Elysium, but you still get the over-14s in there.
Elysium desperately needs more showers for between saunas. The shower at the moment is the Calla Shower, which is an overgrown calla lily which rains down lukewarm water into an ankle-deep pool but it could do with some ordinary cold (or hot) showers tucked away somewhere.
It doesn’t feel like there are any lifeguards; the staff are there to (apparently arbitrarily) enforce rules – no GoPros, hair must be tied up, no neoprene pool shoes in the water, sit correctly on the towel in the sauna and so on, which made me kind of feel most of the day like I was just waiting for someone to come down on me for unwittingly doing something else wrong, which is not relaxing.
The aforementioned free wifi works by sending you a code – despite me selecting UK as my phone’s country code (not an option I had when booking the next therme on my to-do list…), the code never arrived, thus I could not connect to it. That might be a me problem rather than a general problem but it’s something worth noting in case it’s general.
If you’re after authentic Romanian wellness traditions, this isn’t where you’ll find it. Yes, the water is natural geothermal water from a borehole (and extensively treated to remove calcium, sulphur, carbon and then ozonated, which is how its sanitised) but if Romania has any kind of longstanding bathing culture, this isn’t it.
To get from the door to the bus stop, you have to walk across an area of the front and the car park that is completely unlit, which is both a trip hazard and a bit intimidating if you depart after dark. I was expecting the bus stop to be a little closer to the door than it is, which I understand – the car park is huge and not everyone can come straight to the door but it almost feels like the bus people are being hidden away in a corner.
The weird
If you follow me on Instagram, you may already know this. Phones are welcome pretty much everywhere that’s not a sauna or an outdoor pool but if you pull out a GoPro, they’ll be on that quicker than airport security on a bomb. I cannot fathom why waterproof cameras are such a big no-no. With my phone, I could be taking exactly the same photos or videos, or photos and videos that I shouldn’t be taking, and I can have them out of the therme and onto the internet before anyone even knows I’ve taken them. What, then, is the problem with the camera that is just a camera?
Speaking of cameras, the rules say actually no cameras in any pools but it appeared to be absolutely fine to take phones into the indoor pools. Just be aware that it may not be the same when you’re there if there’s a different set of staff supervising. Either that or they’re just really inconsistent with which rules they enforce.
The saltwater pool in The Palm’s mineral baths will find every minor injury you never knew you had, every scratch and dent and patch of dry skin and will make it sting so badly you’ll want to rip your own skin off.
There are fitness classes held throughout the day in The Palm main pool, which isn’t that big, however beautiful it is. That will make it quite difficult to get in and out.
The saunas in the Galaxy zone are actually steam rooms, and strongly scented ones at that. They’re nice (the benches have their own little taps so you can rinse them off when you leave) but they’re definitely not saunas.
You can pay off your wristband at a machine rather than queue for a human being to process it but then you have to queue for the human being to take the wristband and open the gate for you anyway.
So, is it overrated?
In my opinion, yeah, absolutely. Maybe it was just an excruciatingly busy day but I’ve been reading other blogs as I write this and I’ve seen the same opinion from other people more than once. Personally, if I ever find myself back in Bucharest, I will no doubt come back but if I’m looking for a nice therme experience, I’d rather go to Germany. Emser Therme was a lot smaller but otherwise more what I’d expect of a waterpark/sauna combi and it’s half the flight time (although I admit, it’s nowhere near as close to an airport).
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