it's a Roman bath complex, but it's now.

April 27, 2023 6:02 AM

Recently, to my great delight, I found that there exists a category of present-day businesses where guests enjoy basically a Roman style bathhouse (mineral water natatio, caldarium, tepidarium, frigidarium) plus modern touches like jets. How can I find more of these places, while not being deluged with massage joints? I don't care about massage. I want to soooooaaaak.

The particular place I'm thinking of was a community joint, not a fancy tourist attraction. It was fed by natural hot springs, and it was a complex of pools of various temperatures, mostly warm or hot, plus vaporarium, sauna, hammam etc. One of the pools had jets for your feet!! It was a blissfully good time.

I want to find more of these places, so the next time I'm traveling I can see if there are any nearby where I'm going. But when I search on the term "spa", what I'm getting is mostly wellness centers with fancy massages and facials, not necessarily much in the way of hot pools. I want hot pools! How can I do a better search?

Bonus, have you been to one of these places yourself that you'd recommend? Anywhere in the world.

posted by fingersandtoes to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (32 answers total)

Best answer: You might use the keyword "onsen"? There are lots in Japan. I went to the big tourist one in Tokyo and really liked it.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 6:07 AM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Searching on "hot springs" might work? Maybe "therapeutic waters"?

I've been here. It was simpler than what you are describing, but definitely nice. There was a tunnel to swim through.
posted by TORunner at 6:11 AM on April 27, 2023

Best answer: Another vote for hot springs, such as this near Olympic National Park in Washington state (which also has undeveloped hot springs in the park).
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:23 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Korean spas have the hot pool/jet experience if you're willing to go indoor and forgo a natural spring.
posted by kingdead at 6:34 AM on April 27, 2023 [10 favorites]

Best answer: I've been to a banya in San Francisco and it was a lot like that.
posted by fifthpocket at 6:35 AM on April 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

I think countries where locals go to places like this as part of a regular community experience, are the ones to target. And for, me the places to start would be Turkey (where the regular community hammams are maybe one of the best modern surviving descendents of the Roman idea. A bit like this. No massage unless you want it - but somebody is going to scrub you down as part of the standard experience).

Or Japan - where the idea of soaking as an activity separate from cleaning oneself - is well understood - from the ofuro baths that people have at home, through to the onsens.
posted by rongorongo at 6:35 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Apologies no links; friend arranged visit in NYC to Aire Ancient Baths, part of a chain (half a dozen in Europe). Beaire.com —the visit was before Covid, don’t know how it’s holding up.

Same friend took us to a baths in Haarlem, the Netherlands. Sauna van Egmond, unforgettable in part for our goofs (sitting in shallow foot bath), and the humor and care of some of the features indoors and out. Pull a rope for a bucket! Cold water. Ice! https://www.saunavanegmond.com/

My sister was married at Chico Hot Springs in Montana.
posted by xaryts at 6:42 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Korean bath house (jimjilbang) has pools.
In Toronto there’s a women’s bath house called Body Blitz that has pools
Russian saunas do to I think.
At all of them massages are available but as an extra paid service, it’s ok to go and not get massaged.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 6:43 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The Turkish baths I visited while traveling around Hungary were divine, multiple soaking experiences. Particularly fell in love with this one in Eger.
posted by missmobtown at 6:49 AM on April 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Best answer: California Hot Springs! Often clothing optional. We've been to three in the past year. Two are featured in 16 Top Natural Hot Springs in California (Vichy and Avila) and then there's Sierra Hot Springs (formerly Campbell Hot Springs) which for reasons? is usually omitted from lists like that. Maybe the communal kitchen, or the terribly pot-holed final approach on their private road? Whatever, I'm a sucker for places with big ol' fireplaces in the central lodge, and we were there in the snow so it was great.
posted by Rash at 6:50 AM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Try the search term "Nordic spa" in colder countries. Turkish/Thermal baths are also pretty common throughout in Eastern Europe (and very affordable - I often found the equivalent of a municipal pool).
posted by veery at 6:51 AM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

My wife and I love these. We call them "thermal suites". That's terminology we've picked up from cruise ships, though (where that's absolutely what they're called) and it might not be widely used outside that space.
posted by jdroth at 6:54 AM on April 27, 2023

Best answer: I loooove bath houses. I would go once a week when i lived in SF. Best weekend activity ever :) You'll need to make a reservation ahead of time for most places.

If you're still in SF, there are a bunch in Japantown. I recommend Pearl Spa -- big hot pool, cold plunge, both wet and dry saunas, plus a salt room and a clay ball room (amazing, my favorite) and a chill room with recliners and a big fish tank. The do Korean body scrubs, which I highly recommend. There's also Kabuki Spa down the street, which is more of an onsen theme, with pools and sauna, but with slate floors and teak lounge chairs, cucumber water and green tea. Imperial Spa is Korean, and offers scrubs as well. It's less fancy but still clean and nice.

Outside of Japan town there's Psy Spa in San Leandro, which is large but basic (pools and saunas). There are also Russian bathhouses, called banyas. My friends love Archimedes, which is in Bayview, but I've not been there myself.
posted by ananci at 6:58 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: It's very spa-y, but Glen Ivy Hot Springs in Corona, CA is my happy place. Various temp pools, plunge pools, my beloved epsom pool, a roman bath indoors attached to the dressing rooms, sauna, and a mud pool where you can get all spackled up and go sit in a mud sauna.

It's about an hour NE of Los Angeles, in the Inland Empire. I love going in the cooler seasons when it's less busy and it's not going to get much above 65 degrees outside at best.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:00 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: oops I should have specified: I don't want naked. Not my naked, preferably not others' naked either. (I went to a hammam in Istanbul once and it was way too much naked.) Would appreciate note as to whether the place you're talking about is a naked place.
posted by fingersandtoes at 7:07 AM on April 27, 2023

Best answer: Thermal spa, hydrotherapy, and thalassotherapy are other terms you could try, and I second "Nordic spa" - Quebec for example has a wonderful Nordic spa scene! I loved the Strøm Spa Vieux-Quebec, where you can hang out in hot pools overlooking the St. Lawrence River.

ETA: not naked!
posted by mskyle at 7:09 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Nth-ing the folks above. The best local options are almost certainly going to be Korean or Japanese bath houses, which are more ubiquitous in diverse mid-size and up cities than most people realize. If you're interested in travelling abroad for this, there are Japanese onsens and Hungarian thermal spas.

You can check the listings on individual choices, but as a general rule of thumb, co-ed and family springs/spas are not naked, gender-separated ones are.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:09 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Oh, also: Hot Springs, Arkansas is named that for exactly the reason it sounds like. Depending on [what have you], the usual hesitations about vacationing in less urban areas of the Deep South will apply there to some extent.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:14 AM on April 27, 2023

(That applies more to the general area, though. Hot Springs itself is a little more open in that way resort communities tend to be.)
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:19 AM on April 27, 2023

Best answer: Many Korean style spas are not just clothing optional but nudity mandatory in the gender segregated areas, so while they're wonderful, probably not what you're looking for. If you can find one that's doesn't have separate areas by gender, they might be what you're looking for. They typically have a variety of temperatures with everything from steam rooms to hot soaks to chilly water that you can go back and forth between. If you choose, they also tend to offer various massages and spas treatments and many have food available. People will literally spends hours in them - some even allow napping there.
posted by Candleman at 7:48 AM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Archimedes Banya in San Francisco is full of naked dudes. (I am a woman who wore a swimsuit but it was ... a lot.)
posted by purpleclover at 8:19 AM on April 27, 2023

Best answer: Sanadome in Nijmegen is pretty great. Their Thermen has big indoor and outdoor pools, a saltwater bath, herbal soaking baths, steam room, etc. Swimwear is mandatory throughout the facility.
posted by neushoorn at 8:59 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: In England, if you visit the city of Bath, you can see the ancient Roman baths and then visit the nearby gleaming lovely modern Thermae spa with an open rooftop pool, various steam rooms using the naturally heated source water. It’s excellent. Zero nakedness.
posted by ElasticParrot at 9:06 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Neighborhood sento in Japan are great! I loved the sento I stumbled into in northwest Kyoto. It was an indoor facility with stools to sit on while showering/cleaning yourself before getting in, then: hot tubs and cold tubs (and tubs of more medium temperatures), various jets (including one where I pressed a button and a jet came hurtling down from above me unexpectedly! Not being able to read any of the Japanese signage made me a feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland, but in a good way), a hot sauna, a *freezing cold* sauna, and a hot tub full of the herbs of the day that turned the water purple. It was fabulous, cheap, and firmly a neighborhood institution. It was also gender-segregated, nudity was the norm, and tattoos were not allowed (common in Japanese sento and onsen).

From what I understand, onsen in Japan (which are also lovely, but sometimes bit more expensive and/or spa-like) are based on natural hot springs, whereas sento are generally man-made.

Iceland, also being volcanic, has a big pool culture with outdoor hot-springs-fed pools of different temperatures in many towns for community swimming and soaking. (These are distinct from tourist hotspots like the Blue Lagoon that show up more readily in Google searches and require expensive reservations and advance planning.) I didn't plan ahead for any of my pools or roadside hot tubs; I just encountered them (and delighted in them) on my travels in Northern Iceland. Everyone at these pools wears swim suits (no nudity).

I also love Everett House in Portland, OR which has wonderful outdoor hot and cold tubs beneath trees, as well as wet and dry saunas, an integrated teahouse you can order from in between soaks, and a fire table you can sit around. Sacred Rain in Seattle is pretty decent for sauna and outdoor hot soaks, too (although I wish they had a cold tub instead of just cold showers). At both Everett House and Healing Rain, nudity is common but optional.
posted by cnidaria at 9:16 AM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Just outside Toronto there is the Go Spa (Korean-style), Ottawa has Koena Spa There is also the chain of Nordic Spas. Toronto also has Russian spas (beat you with birch tree branches!).
posted by saucysault at 9:34 AM on April 27, 2023

Best answer: Yeah, "hot springs" is a search term that will work. So is "Thermal baths".

And since people are recommending specific places:

1. In Brooklyn we have Bathhouse. It has the massage stuff, but it also just has the pools, a couple sauna rooms and a steam room. And it even has a place for a "private soak" where they have a clawfoot bathtub in a private room all on its own and you can book it for a half hour.

2. Friend, you want to go to Budapest. Budapest has natural hot springs, and it's also been controlled by both the Romans and the Ottomans during its history - both of whom had a big "bath house" culture. So going to a bathhouse to just hang out is sort of baked into the culture as A Thing To Do.

And these are not just any bathhouses. The biggest one, Széchenyi, has three Olympic-pool-size outdoor pools, two of them heated, and a couple pools indoors - some plunge pools, some mineral baths. It has a total of 13 pools in all.

The Gellert Bath house also has a series of pools and saunas - indoor and outdoor - including a wave pool (only open in summer). One of the steam rooms is so powerful that I literally could not see anything when I walked in save for a thick white mist, and I could only spend three minutes in there because it was loosening up my sinuses so well that every time I blew my nose I was probably dislodging crap that had been stuck in there since the Obama administration. It's also done up in a seriously fancy-ass Art Nouveau style (because that's when they built it) so you're not just soaking, you're soaking in gorgeously outfitted splendor.

Here's Time Out's list of the top nine (!) spas in Budapest. There are even more.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:00 AM on April 27, 2023 [9 favorites]

Best answer: Forgot to mention that the outdoor pools in Széchenyi should indeed still be open in fall/winter. I went in late October, and the only thing they closed was the swimming pool; the two thermal pools were still open. They were at either end of the swimming pool, though, so moving from one to the other required a 50-foot sprint through the cold in the spa-issued flip-flops with your towel pulled very tightly around you; but once you got to the other pool and got in neck deep you were just fine.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:17 AM on April 27, 2023

Best answer: Glen Ivy is extremely not-naked. There are gendered changing rooms in which you might see changing-room-nudity, but even those have a couple of curtained changing rooms, and all the showers are individual cubicles with curtains.
posted by Lyn Never at 2:13 PM on April 27, 2023

Best answer: Places like this are my favorite thing about being a human being (although I favor naked places, which I think are the norm in most of the world outside North America).

Not yet mentioned in the US: In New Mexico, Ojo Caliente (not naked) and Ten Thousand Waves (occasionally somewhat naked). Korean spas like King Spa (I've been to the VA and Chicago locations) will be naked in single-sex areas, where the water is, and clothed elsewhere (saunas). Other NYC locations that I think haven't come up yet are Great Jones Spa (not much water, but not zero) and the Brooklyn Banya, as well as Russian and Turkish Baths (haven't been, can't vouch for). Ditto for Sojo, but might be less naked?

There are also approximately one million onsen (natural hot springs baths) and sento (indoor bath houses) in Japan, though they will be single-sex naked. Also, some do not allow people with tattoos to bathe there.
posted by fast ein Maedchen at 4:48 PM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Ooh and I dream of going to Iceland's Blue Lagoon, though apparently it's really touristy. And I forgot the Liquidrom in Berlin!
posted by fast ein Maedchen at 4:50 PM on April 27, 2023

Best answer: In Melbourne there's Sense of Self which is a not-naked bath house.

(Also re the term: "bathhouse" is also a common term for a sex-on-premises venue, so be careful with your Google searches. Though usually you'd get a decent idea of the sort of venue it is pretty quickly by their web presence.)
posted by creatrixtiara at 10:28 PM on April 27, 2023

Hammam Spa is the name I'd look up.
posted by k3ninho at 12:53 PM on April 30, 2023