Spa and wellness: eight hotels where treatment makes the trip

Almost every hotel in Mauritius has a spa. Many amount to a few treatment rooms and a hammam, which is enough for a massage after the beach. A few, by contrast, are built as places in their own right, with their pools, gardens and programmes, and they change the nature of the stay: you do not spend an hour there, you come back every day.

The eight houses that follow were chosen for that reason. They differ in scale, from six treatment rooms to seven thousand square metres, and in philosophy, from Ayurveda to hydrotherapy. For each, what matters is what the spa offers that is particular to it and what the stay includes.

At Saint-Félix, on the south coast, the spa is the heart of the house: about seven thousand square metres, with five rooms devoted to Ayurveda, yoga rooms with a floor designed for practice, meditation rooms, a lap pool, a Watsu pool and an AquaFit pool. The hotel is a yoga destination, with an international team of teachers and visiting masters.

A wellness chef can draw up a meal plan for the whole stay, and the five restaurants follow a farm-to-table approach, with a kitchen garden and a herb garden. Private formulas allow guests to book the gym, the lap pool or the sauna for themselves alone.

At Trou aux Biches, on the north-west coast, the spa covers 2,897 square metres and divides into two wings of opposite moods. On one side, air-conditioned treatment rooms and relaxation areas; on the other, past the pool, thirteen treatment rooms under broad thatched roofs, linked by paths beneath flowering pergolas, each with its own small garden.

In all there are seventeen massage rooms, six of them doubles and two set aside for shiatsu and Thai massage, a balneotherapy room, two rooms with affusion showers, and dry and wet steam baths. It opens from 9:00 to 20:00.

At Balaclava, the Maritim Tropical Flower Spa spreads across 3,500 square metres of gardens, with a waterfall and a pond. Guests unwind beneath the waterfall, between sauna, hammam and hot tub, and the products used are made from local plants.

The twenty-five-hectare estate borders Turtle Bay, the island’s first national marine park, and holds the ruins of Balaclava, an eighteenth-century national monument. Horse and pony rides take place within the estate, which is also home to giant tortoises.

At Grand Baie, the LUX* ME spa covers 1,625 square metres over several levels, with a Turkish hammam, a heated pool and a hydrotherapy circuit on the lower floor. It brings together a Niyama studio for body and mind, an indoor cycling studio, an Oway hair salon and Bastien Gonzalez’s Révérence studio, devoted to the care of hands and feet.

On the roof, Muscle Up is an open-air fitness space, with a thirty-metre running track built to Olympic standards. The spa also offers an evening of treatments, from 21:00 to midnight, as a paid experience.

At Bel Ombre, the Awali’s spa has eighteen treatment rooms, three of them outdoor garden kiosks, a vitality pool, a chilled pool, two relaxation areas, hammams and a sauna, and a room dedicated to children. The hotel runs on an all-inclusive basis, and one treatment per stay is offered to every adult and every child.

At extra cost, wellness walks lead into the Frédérica nature reserve.

In the cove of Turtle Bay, at Balaclava, Le Jadis has turned its spa towards hydrotherapy: a pool with sixty-five air and water jets, a Rainmist treatment room, a sauna and a hammam, and an outdoor treatment room in a tipi. Complete wellness cures can be followed on site.

Yoga, meditation, tai chi and aqua aerobics take place on the beach or in the water, never indoors. Three wellness sanctuaries, the Lily, the Orchid and the Rubia, are designed for complete immersion, and a beauty salon works with natural ingredients made on site.

At Pointe aux Canonniers, the spa is built in the branches of a two-hundred-year-old banyan tree: six massage rooms on staggered levels, in thatch, traveller’s palm and wood, with outdoor showers, reached by stone stairs. It opens from 9:00 to 20:00.

Massages, facials, pedicures and manicures there are reserved for hotel guests. The tropical garden around it, of some twenty arpents, is dotted with remains, among them an old fortification and its cannons.

At Bel Ombre, the Santosha Mindful Wellness spa spreads through the heart of the landscaped gardens, with fourteen treatment rooms, all of them doubles, a Vichy shower room, a hammam, a sauna, a hydrojet and a twelve-metre pool. It opens from 9:00 to 20:00.

The hotel runs on an all-inclusive basis, and the Family rooms and Family suites come with a twenty per cent discount at the spa. The house also has its own nightclub and karaoke bar, the Jalsa, but the spa keeps apart, in the middle of the gardens.

In every case, treatments should be booked on arrival, and sometimes before: double rooms, outdoor kiosks and private formulas go first.