Lakeside lodge or clifftop hotel? Designer detox or retro bathing hut? Here’s our pick of great spas to boost your wellbeing
SHA Wellness Clinic, Alicante, Spain
Set into Alicante’s Sierra Helada mountains, SHA’s sharp curves and clean white lines give it the overstated cool of an Ibizan super-club, or a pharmacy on the USS Enterprise.
I’d just begun an incredibly restrictive diet (part of a mad life challenge that shall one day bear fruit, maybe) and the nutrition plan for my stay was meticulously tailored to my incredibly exacting needs. Within this remit, SHA managed to create spectacularly appetising meals, worlds away from the chicken and broccoli on which I’d been subsisting until then. That I spent my four days in SHA eating these meals 3ft away from Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz was an unexpected bonus, and one upon which it would be gauche for me to dwell.
SHA’s approach to wellbeing is famously thorough and I sampled more than a dozen treatments, from yoga and training sessions to acupuncture and cupping, to deep tissue, Indiba, and aqua-cranio-cervical massage. The best of these was a mix of water therapy and shiatsu – colloquially termed “watsu” – which involved being fitted with floatation devices and being walked around a body-temperature pool held by a burly physiotherapist, for an hour of ego-dissolving bliss.
