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Long Read! Hot Pools, Waterslides, and Cocktails: Inside the New Supersized Spas
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This is the outside podcast with patty o. Hey everybody, Fred Dreier here. I'm the features editor at Outside. You're listening to another long read on the Outside Podcast where I read one of our classic long form stories about adventure, survival, true crime and noteworthy people from the world of outdoor culture. Thank you so much for listening and subscribing to the Outside Podcast. Please rate and review us on the podcast platform of your choice. If your favorite way to read is with your ears, I encourage you to join Outside Plus. It gives you unlimited access to everything in the Outside network, including more audio stories from Outside, backpacker, climbing, ski and more. Plus you get mapping apps like trailforks and Gaia GPS and Map My Fitness this week we have a story by one of my favorite Outside riders, Bill Gifford. Bill has written about a wide range of topics for us, from mavericks of the ski industry to the ecology of the Great Salt Lake to the Tour de France's most interesting cyclist, and pretty much everything in between. In recent years, Bill has been writing books and magazine pieces on aging, longevity and heat, how the body reacts to saunas, cold plunges and hot tubs. His latest story for Outside combines these three interests. Bill wrote about Thermay, a European health and wellness brand that operates stadium sized spas across the globe. Well, it turns out Thermay is planning to build three massive spas in North America. So Bill traveled to Bucharest, Romania to experience the Thermay in person and to determine whether or not Americans are ready for Euro style communal bathing. So without further ado, Thermay supersized health spas are coming to the U.S. are Americans ready to bathe together? By Bill Gifford in one of the most economically depressed neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. on a warm fall afternoon, wood smoke rises from a vacant lot that tells me I'm headed in the right direction. Exiting the Anacostia metro station on a bright afternoon, I chart a course towards the smoke. In less than five minutes I arrive at an unlikely scene for this part of town, a bustling pop up village consisting of six mobile saunas arranged in a loose circle around a patch of Astroturf. Dozens of people wait for their turn in the saunas and in the biggest one, a refitted shipping container with one side entirely made of glass. A lithe blonde woman runs a sound bath class for a full house of about 25 people. In the smaller sauna next door, a friendly yoga instructor from Tampa leads the quirkiest breathwork class I've ever experienced. First she asks us to quack like ducks, then buzz like bees, we comply until our buzzing bursts in to laughter. Laughing is breath work, insists the instructor, Annette Scott. Over to one side of the village well, steamed sauna goers line up to dip in a large woodsided tub of clear cold water. Just past that, in a big white tent, more bodies are bending, twisting and sweating on stretchy mats. The yoga and Pilates classes are packed all day long. There's also locally blended herbal tea on tap, a stocked bar and a barbecue truck offering half smokes, a D.C. delicacy that's like a chili dog but indescribably better. If you know, you know. A pop up sauna village is a common sight in hipster havens like Minneapolis, Seattle and Burning Man. A large and splashy sauna festival with 16 wood burning saunas and a park beside the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn wrapped up in March. The one in D.C. held last October, took place in a far less hipster friendly spot, Anacostia, the historically poorest part of town across the Anacostia River, a tributary of the Potomac and worlds away from the monuments and government buildings that we see on the news every afternoon. Commuters zoom right past this spot without stopping on freeways whisking them to greener suburbs. They're missing out. An Acostia is also known for Cedar Hill, the historic home of Frederick Douglass, as well as the former St Elizabeth's Mental Institution, acres of forested parklands and the occasional pair of nesting bald eagles. Today, however, this little corner of Anacostia is jammed with neighborhood residents who make up about 30% of the attendees, but also with people from the suburbs. I sit next to one father son duo who drove 45 minutes from Virginia. Most people are in shorts or bathing suits, which are available to rent, but not everyone is dressed for the occasion. I pop into one of the smaller saunas to find a tall, elegant looking woman dressed in voluminous linen pants and a tailored top, both of which are completely soaked from sweat or from a trip to the cold plunge? I can't tell. Maybe both. She hopped into the sauna Village on the spur of the moment as she was headed somewhere else, and now she seems in no hurry to leave. Leaning back, eyes closed, she murmurs, we need this all the time. Her wish might come true. This two day event, along with this winter's better publicized sauna pop up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is a kind of stalking horse for a much bigger project. Both events were staged by a mysterious European company called Thermae Group, which recently announced plans to build a massive bathing complex with multiple saunas and huge soaking pools, several water slides and an indoor botanical garden just a few yards away on a vacant tract of federal parkland besides the Anacostia River. The approximate price tag of the project? $500 million. ThermaDC is just one of seven such projects that the Thermae Group is planning for cities around the world, including Manchester, uk, which just began construction Toronto, Singapore, Frankfurt, Incheon, near Seoul, Dubai, Dallas and right here in Anacostia. That's only a beginning. The company says it eventually plans to build no fewer than 10 therma complexes or thermes in North America alone. While most Americans have never heard of Thermae, it is better known in Europe, where the company owns and operates five massive and popular bathing parks. Four are in Germany, but the newest one, and the template for future expansion, is located just outside Bucharest, Romania. Despite its out of the way location, Therme Bucharest has grown into a global tourist destination and Instagram hotspot, a sprawling 470,000 square foot structure with 10 soaking pools, 16 water slides and 16 saunas under its vast roof, plenty to entertain its 1.7 million annual visitors. Thermae Manchester, set to open in 2028, will be twice the size of Thermae Bucharest. Thermade Deci will rival the scale of Nationals park, the baseball stadium just across the river. When finished, it will dwarf the three shiny new 10 story apartment buildings that have sprung up just across the road from the vacant lot where the Sana Village sits. The vanguard of the neighborhood's redevelopment plans are not yet final, but Thermade DC will occupy 17 acres of former federal land beside the Anacostia river, with a soaring steel and glass roof that will be visible for miles around, including from planes landing at Reagan National Airport just across the Potomac. Thermae and the city of Washington, D.C. estimate that the project will employ 5,000 construction workers and more than 700 permanent employees. These grand plans make the head spin, but while Thermae and similar spa complexes are familiar in Europe, especially Germany, they are definitely not a thing in North America. After Thermae DC was announced last spring, I had a difficult time grasping what exactly it might look like, let alone how to describe it to people. Other North Americans seem similarly confused. In Toronto, opposition to the Thermate construction has been particularly sharp as as locals protested the decision to award Thermae development rights to a part of a treasured yet neglected lakefront park, the skeptical Conspirituality Health podcast slagged the project as a Maha Wellness scam. What actually was this thing? Nobody seemed to know for sure. So I flew to Bucharest to see for myself. Moments after stumbling off my stuffy Romanian Airlines flight, I run into the president of Therma US Robbie Hammond. He's easy to spot in his custom tailored pink button down shirt with the letters S O A K stitched across the middle. Also, he's the only person in the Bucharest airport who is smiling. As a young advertising executive in the late 90s, Hammond had co founded Friends of the Highline, the fundraising and advocacy group that transformed an abandoned elevated railway line on the fringes of Manhattan's west side into a thriving neighborhood park and global tourist attraction. That blockbuster success is why Thermay Group hired him to help realize its two U.S. projects, one in D.C. and the other in Dallas. Despite his outside ambition, Hammond is friendly and easygoing in person, which makes sense. Thermay's primary product is relaxation, as I'm about to learn. An hour after landing, we're floating in an enormous warm pool, gazing up at palm trees, a glass roof and the late afternoon sky above as our jet lag melts away. Therme Bucharest styles itself as a wellness oasis, a place where guests can do healthyish things like water aerobics, soaking in mineral baths or sweating in saunas followed by a cocktail or a glass of wine if they choose. It's like wellness Light. It's not a gym, hammond had told me. It's like a wellness Disney World. There are three zones. The Palm, the main area with a sprawling quarter acre indoor outdoor pool kept at a comfortable 91 degrees Fahrenheit. There are also a dozen or so mineral and soaking pools Elysium, featuring 16 saunas and steam baths, each with a different ambiance and heat level, plus treatment rooms for massages and an outdoor patio for relaxing and sipping drinks. Kids are only allowed in a separate family friendly area called Galaxy, which has some pretty thrilling water slides. It feels like a spa married to a tropical resort next to a Great Wolf Lodge style water park. Also all beneath a soaring steel and glass canopy that rises from the surrounding plain like a fancy new airport terminal. Bucharest seems like an unlikely spot for a wellness mecca. Pinned between Bulgaria, Serbia and Ukraine, the former communist nation of Romania has an average life expectancy of 76.6 years, even lower than that of the U.S. a dubious achievement for a European nation. Most EU members way outperform the U.S. average lifespan of 79.6. Fully 1/3 of the male population of Romania smokes and another third admits to binge drinking. One of Therma's stated goals is to try and solve this problem in Romania and beyond, which seems ambitious to say the least. But in its proposals and public statements, Thermay says it doesn't just want to build flashy water parks and resorts, but to make wellness physical but also social accessible to the masses. Their business model the Ancient Roman Baths Thermae Bucharest is not actually located in the city of Bucharest. Instead, it sits on its own in a kind of no man's land between the suburbs and farmland. The nearest hotel is a Hilton Garden Inn a couple of miles away. Funny spot for a recreation of the ancient Roman baths. While driving out from the center of Bucharest the next morning, battling traffic every inch of the way, I wonder, why is this here? Free Heat is why the massive complex happens to stand atop a deep geothermal spring, explains Robert Hanaya, Thermal's colorful CEO and founder, at a conference table in Thermae's corporate offices, a set of modular buildings across the road from the spa. Hana had come into possession of this land about 25 years ago and had thought about building something practical on the site, like a geothermal power plant. His other business is industrial engineering in H Vac, but he decided to build this phantasmal bathing complex instead. Why not? He was inspired, he says, by a similar and highly successful facility in Germany called Thermae Erdang, which opened in 1999 outside Munich and remains the largest thermal spa in the world. Some context Many cities and towns in Germany, Austria and Switzerland have public baths known as thermes, with pools and often saunas. Most are utilitarian facilities that are subsidized by local governments, like public swimming pools. Therme Erding was huge, spectacular and profitable. Hana wanted to create something just as grand in his home country. He befriended Josef Wund, the German architect who had built Therme Erdang and borrowed from his template to create Therme Bucharest, which is smaller but similar. The two main differences Thermay Erding has a textile free zone, while Thermae Bucharest requires swimsuits. Also, Therme Bucharest is heated by geothermal water, which required workers to drill two miles into the earth in order to access the 175 degree Fahrenheit underground spring, which heats the place. Some of the water is filtered, treated and allowed to cool before being used in the pools. It worked. Despite its off the beaten path location, Therme Bucharest quickly became a popular European destination, drawing some 1.7 million annual visitors last year, on par with some US national parks. Wund died in a private jet crash in 2017. Last December Hana's Thermae acquired the German Thermae, bringing all the thermas under one corporate umbrella and accelerating its global expansion. As Hana sought to replicate Therma's success around the world, he envisioned creating dozens of thermes in city centers around the world. On my second day, I tagged along on a group visit by community and business leaders from Dallas, where the first U.S. thermae will likely be built. After a friendly chat with Hanya, we trooped across the street to the Thermae complex for a behind the scenes Tour guided by VP of Operations Robert Solomon, a former banker in his 50s who loved bathing at Thermes so much that he quit his job and went to work for the company. The pool was nearly empty at 9am as we filed through a discreet metal door and followed Solomon down two flights of stairs into the bowels of the building where a massive battery of pumps and fans, wind and word keeping air and water moving around as many as 8,000 daily bathers, almost as tricky keep keeping palm trees alive indoors in a climate where winters routinely dip below 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Solomon showed us how each of the 1,500 odd palm trees had its own dedicated air and water lines. Like a little life support system for each individual plant, it seems to be working. One palm in particular reached exuberantly towards the 100 foot high glass roof, which unfortunately means that the tree's days are likely to be numbered. It will break right through the glass, solomon told us, so it will need to removed the most striking thing I noticed during our tour was the smell of the water in the pools. I had braced myself for the usual odor of chlorine, the olfactory signature of North American pools and water parks and hot tubs, but there wasn't one. Deep in the bowels of the facility, Thermae officials showed us the complex treatment infiltration system that first puts the required amount of germ killing chemicals into the water, a about a quarter the concentration required in the US and then pulls it back out via a complicated ozonation process that I can't begin to explain. All I can say is it works and the primary scent in the main pool area comes not from a bleach jug but from tropical flowers. Tour over, it was time to hit the pools again after sunset. The night before, the vibe of the place had shifted on a dime as the sky darkened, moody blue and purple lights came on, illuminating the palm trees and giving the main pool the feeling of an nightclub. Instagrammers Instagrammed on the steps leading into the water and couples floated around entwined with each other. The pool is adults only. Kids are limited to the Galaxy Waterslide Zone. The music throbbed quietly. The bars got busy. The water was, as always, invitingly warm. The following morning is completely different. Bright, airy, wholesome. I joined Hammond and about a hundred women in a water aerobics class led by an energetic young instructor who who makes us put our pool noodles through their paces. Relaxed and invigorated, I wander around sampling the soaking pools infused with magnesium, zinc and dead sea salt, among other minerals, each said to convey specific health benefits. I LOL in the lithium infused pool, which is supposed to improve my mood. Maybe it does. The sound system plays cheery spa music, which also helps. As the day progresses, the main pool area gradually fills up with guests from all over Europe and beyond. Girls trips from Italy, guys trips from Berlin. I drift over to the Swim up bar and drink a beer with some working class Brits right beside a group of black American ladies from Atlanta downing fruity cocktails, then repair to the lounging area where I chat with an Italian architect on a solo getaway. Seeking an adrenaline fix, I dip into the Galaxy Zone and ride a couple of dizzying water slides, then return to grab some Mediterranean lunch at the cafe. Later, I ask Hammond what this project has in common with the High Line. Three things, he says. High level design, top quality plant tanks, the coddled palm trees, and most of all, the people. Part of the experience is the people watching, he says. And it's everybody you see everybody. You see all kinds of bodies. And that's both at the High Line and at Thermae. But it only works when it's busy. Thermae is crowded in winter with Germans wanting to look at palm trees and summer with guests from all over wanting a vaguely exotic beach resort ish experience, minus the hassle and cost of traveling to the actual beach resort. More than that, I got the sense that it was a place that people go because it's a place that other people go. The people are part of the attraction, and Instagram keeps them coming to the take. Selfies against the soaring glass roof, the seductive blue pools, the lush indoor jungle, the sense of scale and space, which is also part of the attraction. Thermae's business is based on the German thermes, but its true inspiration, according to Hanna, is the Roman baths, specifically the colossal baths of Carcalla, the ruins of which still stand in central rome. Finished in 216 AD, the Baths of Carcalla rivaled Y stadium in size, drawing an estimated 6,000 visit a day. The entire system covered 27 acres, and its soaring grandeur has inspired generations of Western architects, such as the builders of the original Pennsylvania Station, for example. Fabulous and lavish as they were, however, the ancient baths were not only intended for the elite but for everyone. Every city of any size had a bathing complex with sauna like warm rooms, steam chambers, bathing pools, and usually a cold room called a frigidarium. The activities were not limited to bathing either. The larger complexes had sports facilities, food and drink, libraries, even theaters for musical and dramatic performances. Despite their spectacular and obvious expensive architecture, the Roman baths were cheap and often free of charge to use. Common people and even slaves were welcome. The luxurious and pleasurable world of baths afforded the great greater urban population a welcome opportunity to escape their overcrowded and cramped living conditions and the dusty streets for a few hours a day and bathe in style, writes Figrit Yegul, a scholar of classical bathing at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Moreover, for many it was their only opportunity to bathe at all. Ew. But also great. More to the point, the bath served as a nexus for urban social and political life. They were the only place where everyone met up. As Yagul writes, the baths represented the epitome of democratic ideals in Roman society. This, Hannea insists, is what he wants to recreate a wellness space that includes rather than excludes and that is affordable to the masses. This needs to be the downtown core of cities, and it needs to be one of the most useful things in the city, hanaya had declared at our morning meeting. It's not a nice thing to have. It's a must thing to have a space where people can have positive human interaction because they want to be together. Even VIPs who land at the site's modest helipad must wait in line. There is no fast pass to skip the queue. We have Uber drivers that are coming every day, he humble brags. Walking back from the cafe, I'm accosted by an attractive couple in matching white logoed polo shirts wielding iPads. They want to know if I would like to have my body scanned. Stand okay. They guide me to stand in a circular platform while an expensive looking camera device whirls around me, capturing my entire body in 3D. This scan, by a company called Phi, then spits a report to my phone with insights about my health based on my posture and stance. Turns out I'd better watch out for my neck and upper spine, which are bowed from decades of riding bikes and sitting at desks writing stories like this one Unsure of what to do with this probably useful but somewhat dispiriting knowledge, I decide to go and get a massage. That in turn leads me to Elysium, the sauna area, the busiest place at the resort. When Thermae Bucharest opened in 2016, it had no saunas at all. Those in place now were built in response to overwhelming demand, plus a new addition, a sustainable wood burning sauna on the roof deck designed by architecture students from Norway. This week they are especially busy thanks to Thermae's annual Herbarium Festival, an eclectic gathering of healers and herbalists and performers from across Europe and beyond. The main attraction is a full slate of aufgouss shows, brief performances held inside the saunas. In its most basic form, Auf Gus features one or more very athletic performers dancing around the sauna stove and waving towels to blast spectators with hot air. Typically, they will mash ice balls into the hot sauna rocks, often infused with scented oils, mint, evergreen lemongrass, sage and more exotic flavors such as moss and Japanese herbs. Aufgross can be a lot one doesn't always want to be smacked in the face with broiling steam, but it does help prevent people from getting bored while slow roasting in a 180 degree sauna. And as I learn at times, it can be brilliant. I squeeze into a few shows, including a salt ritual that leaves me sneezing and somewhat confused, a peaceful sound therapy session, and a woodsy but vague forest bathing experience accented with mushrooms and piney scents. The most powerful is an operatic catharsis by a fit, intense Norwegian man whose rendition of E Lusivan le Stella from Tosca has half the house sobbing as we file out. Outside the sauna, I spot a sweaty, shirtless Hannea who'd snuck in incognito. Flying home, I felt like I'd been on a mini vacation rather than a whirlwind 48 hour visit. But I wondered, is the US really ready for its own version of the Roman baths? More concretely, will Thermae's grandiose plans even be realized? The math is daunting. If each thermae costs $500 million to build, multiplied by seven planned thermas across three continents, that starts adding up to some serious money, although of course each will be built and financed over a period of many years. According to John Alschuler, chairman of Therma US, Dallas will likely open first, possibly as soon as 2030, on a downtown adjacent site by the Trinity River. Next up is Toronto, provided the political opposition fades. Then Washington, D.C. financing is already in place for Manchester Thermae, which is under construction and scheduled to open in 2028. But the others remain a question mark. Financing's never easy, all Schuler admits. But I have no doubt, given the dynamism of the D.C. region and the beauty of the site, its location and its access by both mass transit and automobile will get the financing. But before this cluster of saunas on a patch of Anacostia dirt can be replaced by a glassy bathing palace a hundred yards away before any financing can be put in place, there's also a bureaucratic gauntlet to be run. Land must be swapped, designs approved and the new Washington commander's NFL football stadium must be built first, just up the Anacostia river from the proposed Thermae site. Al Schuler, a former New York real estate developer who built Brooklyn Bridge park, admits that the ultimate opening date is likely in 2031 or 2032. He says thermay is betting that these places will serve as urban oases, quick getaways for city dwellers and visitors at an accessible price. An all day pass to Therme Bucharest costs about $50 plus food, 9 to $12 for most entrees and drink, $7 margaritas and whatever else you want. Those are Romanian prices, but a bargain compared to those of an upscale New York City bathhouse. A two hour session at Bathhouse Flatiron, which is much smaller and has no palm trees or lithium pools, let alone water slides, costs more than $110 at peak hours. Hammond says the North American Thermas will be more affordable at a similar price point to Bucharest in order to maximize visitation. This only works at scale, he says. Indeed, if each guest spends, say, $125 per visit and each thermate costs $500 million to build, that works out to 4 million visits just to cover the construction costs, not counting operating expenses. That is a lot of visitors but thermal out of the way. European city sees 2.8 million visitors per year. At that rate, Thermody could pay for itself to within 18 months or so. Where will those visitors come from? This is one of the questions that the pop up was intended to help answer. Is there demand for this? Will thousands of tourists and locals cross the Anacostia river to float around in pools and sweat in saunas and rip down water slides? One factor in Thermae's favor is that there's not much else to do in Washington that's fun. Besides going to museums and monuments and perhaps catching a ball gang, some of the 27.2 million tourists who visit the city every year might welcome the chance to send their kids to plant water slides while they lounge in a quasi tropical pool sipping. Then there's the question of scale. Sauna is trendy now. Bathhouses are popping up in cities around the country, from New York to Austin to Salt Lake City where I live. But the industry is still nascent, like coffee bars and yoga studios back in the day. Most commercial sauna bathhouses are so small that the Therme Bucharest could swallow them like an amuse bouche. Even othership, one of the largest New York City bathing establishments fits only 64 guests or so at a time. Thermay's 16 saunas can handle many times that. Large scale bathing simply doesn't exist in the US but it used to, even if present generations have forgotten. Decades ago, people would flock by trains to destinations like Saratoga Springs, New York, Glenwood Springs, Colorado and Hot Springs, Arkansas. George Washington used to travel two days by carriage to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia in order to bathe. These places are all preserved as relics from an earlier time, but back in the day they were major tourist destinations. Hot Springs, Arkansas is still thriving, drawing 10 million annual tourists to its national park and its eight private thermal bathing spas. Thermae wants to bring that experience to big cities and to attract similar large scale visitation. Its goal is not to cannibalize the existing 32 billion ish dollar American spa market, but to create something wholly different. Not a spa, not a water park, not a Disney style resort, but in between those three poles, only more relaxed and cheaper. And with palm trees. I think one of the reasons people have such a good experience at Thermae is because they are surrounded by living plants, says Hammond. But what surprised me the most about the Anacostia Sauna pop up, especially as someone who grew up in D.C. and lived there into my late 20s, was who showed up. Places like saunas, spas and beach resorts tend to be exclusive and expensive. Thermae aims to be affordable and is intentionally located in one of the city's least affluent neighborhoods. Admission to the pop up was free and over 3,000 curious bathers stepped through the gates over two days. According to the organizers, 80% had never been in a sauna before. In fact, at the time, D.C. had no public sauna establishments at all. As Al Shuler put it, there's no data like actually having real people show up. This wasn't the usual spa sauna crowd either. While the wellness world is overwhelmingly white and luxury focused, this was different. About one third of the visitors came from the Anacostia neighborhood itself, while 30% came from the suburbs, with the rest from other parts of D.C. proper. That didn't happen very often in the past. The Washington D.C. that I grew up in, decades after the civil rights movement, was still de facto segregated for the most part. Schools, neighborhoods, politics, recreation, ethnicities were not entirely separated, but largely so. White flight was still a thing, and the Anacostia river marked a demarcation line dividing the city by color and especially class. But the Sana Village was like a different place from a different time, with black folks and white folks sitting next to each other on the sauna benches, sweating happily together okay, thanks so much for listening to this week's Long Read on the Outside Podcast. If your favorite way to read is with your ears, I encourage you to join Outside Plus. For our podcast listeners, we have a special offer for 25% off head to Outside Watch/Listen to learn more. That's Outside Watch Listen. Thanks so much.