Spa Stories
Read about places our team has been to.
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Off the coast of Sicily is the island home to one of the world’s first day spas. Marc Llewellyn gets hot on its trail.
You might easily turn your nose up at a place which stinks of rotten eggs in parts and has signs warning of an ‘extreme risk of suffocation’ if you get too close to the sulphurous outpourings from the centre of the earth.
An active volcanic island might not be the obvious choice for a Mediterranean holiday, but package it up with warm shallow bays, bubbling mud baths, black sand beaches and a fully-fledged god beating out thunderbolts beneath your feet and you have an unique destination.
My first good look at Vulcano, the rugged volcanic outcrop that gave its name to all the world’s volcanoes, was from nearby Lipari, the largest and most developed of seven islands that make up the Aeolian archipelago.
From a popular viewpoint, high in the hills, you can peer out across the narrow strait at the wisps of swirling steam escaping from Vulcano’s great crater. According to legend, this is the smoke stack for an underground blacksmith forge belonging to Vulcan. He toiled alongside a host of Cyclops’s as they fashioned thunderbolts for Jupiter, the king of the gods, and weapons for Mars, the god of war.
The hydrofoil from Lipari to Vulcano takes just ten minutes to cross the strait between the two islands, and as soon as you disembark you notice the pungent odour of sulphur wafting from the nearby mud baths – perhaps the world’s first day spa.
The route to the mud baths took me past cafes and bars serving icy strawberry granitas and tiny red shrimp with undercarriages of bright blue eggs. All around was evidence of volcanic activity, from the gnarly, yellow sulphur-stained outcrops of rock to the huge lump of the volcano itself.
The outdoor baths were the haunt of mostly Germans, who plodded between hot spots of gooey sludge, occasionally stopping to slop grey mud over their sunburnt bodies. The sludge is said to cure arthritis and gout, as well as skin diseases and certain gynaecological complaints, but though the benefits of bathing in such pongy sludge are debatable, people have been giving it a go since Roman times.
Once I was covered in mud and the sun had dried it to a pasty clay crust I headed off to the sea to flop down at its edge in a shallow natural spa bath, milky with flaky filaments of sulphur and erupting with bubbles of gas.
The only drawback came later. However much I washed, a noticeable eggy stench still oozed from my swimming costume, the pores of my skin, and my hair. For days I felt like a walking souvenir.
From the mud baths the road ambles past cane fields and low-rise apartments for rent to a slick swathe of black sand edged by painted wooden fishing boats bobbing gently in the green crystal water.
I had one eye on climbing the volcano before I came, and from my beach towel a lip of rock which obscured the crater made it look far less daunting than it had seemed from the viewing point on Lipari.
The half-hour tramp up the dusty pathways from the base was hard going in places, especially nearer the top where erosion meant a bit of clambering around.
But what I got for my effort was a view directly down an enormous bowl puffing out clouds of gases.
Further along the rim the track broke up into active fumaroles – holes in the ground that belched out more hot, suffocating steam and were surrounded by canary yellow crystalline deposits. I was forced to dash across these, with my breath held in, to make it to the last steep rise that led up to the volcano’s highest lip.
There, with a god and his servants sweating it out below me aching legs, I could relax and take in a volcanic panorama which led across a stretch of Mediterranean as far as Mount Etna and the violent Stromboli, which pumped molten lava into the early evening sky as I watched.
Note: Heading to Sicily? Then stop off at Termini Imerese. The town has been a significant spa town for more than 2,500 years. It has some of the best luxury hotels in Sicily, and most offer an extensive range of health and beauty treatments.
TRIP NOTES
Getting there: The ferry company Siremar (www.siremar.it) operates overnight services from Naples year round. The ferry calls in at Stromboli, Panarea, Salina, Lipari and Vulcano. Snav (www.snav.it) operates a fast hydrofoil service from Naples to the same islands between May and September. Both companies also operate passenger hydrofoils several times a day from Milazzo on Sicily. These hydrofoils connect all the islands.
Further Information on the Aeolian Islands: www.findingnino.com.au