The island is only 21 miles long and just under three miles wide – a coastal path wraps around the bay of Čikat, and a guide walks us along it into a forest to pick herbs and plants, which we take back to the spa to blend and distil into a balm. The spa here stretches across the basement of the white 1960s hotel – one end is dark-walled and soothing, with colour therapy and steam rooms, the other clinical and spare, offering Botox and cryotherapy.Īfter checking in I walk through the piped music of its hallway, be-robed and dazed – perhaps it’s the Lošinj air or perhaps the flight, but I feel almost medicated, floating. We are greeted at the Bellevue, its midcentury furniture suggesting a dozen new ways to relax, with the coldest glasses of water I’ve ever tasted. But one draw of the newly renovated luxury hotels is the scale of their offerings, vast modern spas, air-conditioned to a gentle chill. Typically, visitors have rented mobile homes or stayed on the campsites, all of which are metres from a stony beach, and most of which have their own massage facilities – health drills deep here, wellness is not just for the wealthy. That and the blue water, the heat, and its relative affordability. Today, having dusted off the title “wellness island”, Lošinj is welcoming a new influx of tourists visiting to enjoy air quality so pure (a combination of salt-spray from the sea, hundreds of thousands of Aleppo pines, and a unique geographical micro-climate) it’s been proven to improve lung health.
In the late 1800s, after Croatian botanist Ambroz Haračić helped reforest this previously rocky port, the Austro-Hungarian government declared Lošinj a health resort. But this year the scattered five-star hotels have started chartering these tiny, terrifying flights to bring a wealthier clientele from Russia and the UK, people attracted by its historic “wellness” credentials. Until now, the island of Lošinj in Croatia has been accessible to many only via a five-hour road and ferry trip from Zagreb, so it’s remained a holiday destination for tourists driving from Hungary or Germany. It is for this reason that I’m sweating on a six-seater plane with my family, juddering over the Adriatic and pretending to our four-year-old that everything is completely, totally fine. And all because a holiday is never just a holiday. Across the globe, retreats and resorts are opening or rebranding, whether it’s yurts in Cornwall or medical clinics in Greece, places to improve oneself, ideally while also getting a tan. The Global Wellness Institute predicts that by 2020 it will rise to $800bn. Today, according to Lonely Planet, “wellness tourism” is the fastest-growing sector in travel, having seen a 10% rise last year to make it a market worth over $500bn. Or the focus on “eco-tourism”, where tourists were encouraged to believe they were saving the world by camping. Consider for instance the inner workings of the period when a holiday was about “travel”, about journeying and exploring, broadening our minds through a long plane ride to somewhere hot. What is a holiday for? Once, I would have confidently said: “For a break from work”, or if I was being paid by the word, “For reading bestsellers, in the sun, slightly drunk on local wine and weather, in a bikini and area of patchy phone reception, just bad enough that you have no choice but to fall behind on world news.”īut it has become clear that the point of a holiday is a fluid and changeable thing, a thing that tells us much about our seasonal anxieties and spiritual ambitions. Eva Wiseman visits a traditional ‘wellness island’ reinvented for the 21st-century traveller
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