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What is a Spa?
The term originates from the Latin ?Salus Per Aqua? which means ?health through water?, however, we have come to associate the word with the old European spa towns where natural springs, hot or cold, saline or sulphuric, produce endless quantities of natural water. Britons of the Victorian era were famous for travelling widely to ?take the waters? of spa towns throughout Europe, including over 100 in the UK, which were believed to have medicinal or healing powers.?

This idea is not new, many of the famous European spa towns were actually put on the map over two thousand years ago during the Roman invasion of Europe, when they took their already advanced bathing culture to those shores. An example being the Emperor Caracalla, who believed the hot springs of Baden Baden in Germany cured his arthritis and where he consequently built one of the finest bathing houses outside Rome.?

We would however be mistaken if we attributed the whole culture of spa bathing to the Romans. Certainly they built bathing houses or spas in great style, but the treatments offered in the modern spa have much wider and indeed older origins. The Middle East provided the origins for the increasingly popular mud bathing, with the mineral rich silt of the Dead Sea having been used for treating skin conditions for many thousands of years. Similarly the Ancient Egyptians valued the healing powers of the mud of the Nile delta, having brought minerals and deposits from the high mountain ranges of Ethiopia.?

Providing the first documentation that a bathing culture existed, Ancient Egypt could arguably be the birthplace of this culture. Cleopatra was of course famed for her love of bathing in ass?s milk to preserve her legendary beauty.?

The need to cleanse the body and hence to beautify is the timeless message of the spa, with relaxation being a by-product associated with more modern generations whose hectic and pressured lifestyles demand that stress is something to be managed and relaxation time planned. The origins of the Sauna lie in the need to cleanse the body, although the health benefits now known to be associated with this form of bathing have come to be realised only in the past 40 years as medical science has researched more deeply into blood pressure related illnesses and the desire to find alternative, non drug based cures has increased.?

Finland is credited with the birth place of the sauna, although the whole of the frozen north of Europe is now known to have had similar forms of bathing, for example the Russian Banya, which is almost identical in design and purpose to the Finnish Sauna. The sauna started life as a timber clad pit in the ground, where logs were burned to heat large stones, as the logs burned out the stones retained their heat and once the smoke from the burnt logs disappeared, the users would sit in the cabin and sweat. As the occupant became hotter they would leave the cabin, sweating profusely and use the snow outside to wipe off the sweat and dirt form the skin. Repeating the process a number of times as the need to be clean dictated. Hence the renowned practice of ?rolling in snow? after bathing in the sauna. Of course, the origins have more practical roots, as water was in short supply in the frozen winters of the north!

The Ottoman empire gave birth to the Hamam, or Turkish Bath as it is known by many. Once again using sweating as a form of cleansing, the traditional Hamam has religious origins with a visit preceding a visit to the Mosque. The old Hamams of Istanbul have beautiful interiors with fantastic examples of traditional Muslim ceramic and mosaic art with inscriptions from the Koran often being present on the walls. However, fine examples of Hamams also exist in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.

The heat source and form of bathing owes something to the Romans, as the Hamam became a meeting place where a large chamber was vaguely subdivided with different areas at different temperatures, offering the ability to sweat or just relax and talk. However, the chamber was dominated by the hot ?bellystone?, an octagonal, raised, heated platform, where the famous soap massage was performed. Masseurs worked in the Hamam offering their services to the occupants in return for tips. It was usual for the ?clients? to wear a ?pestomal? or loin cloth for modesty and to be massaged in public, first using a goat hair mitten for exfoliation followed by a thorough washing of the body after which there was a rinsing in alternate temperature water.

The modern spa can offer all these treatments and many more based on massage and meditation with origins in India and the Far East where the culture has given birth to a more ?hands on? range of treatments which can be performed in suitably tranquil and spacious treatment rooms which form an essential part of the spa.

Regrettably, like all industries these days, a vocabulary of ?jargon? has developed, we attempt to unravel this jargon below and give more meaningful descriptions to the terms applied to the heat experiences offered by the highly specialised manufacturers of thermal experience rooms