I spent most of last year the same way I spent the year before it: firmly planted on my couch. It’s hard to remember what it was like in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic except for that sense of confinement. Now, two years and several variants later, sometimes my life feels like permanent deja vu. To start 2022, I was determined to do something better than logging even more hours watching Netflix. But I also wanted to do something that felt meaningful and important to my wellbeing—both physically and emotionally. So I packed my bags and headed off to a wellness resort.
I’m not the only one that has wellness on the brain, apparently. According to Precedence Research, a market research company, wellness tourism (meaning travel with the specific purpose of participating in wellness activities like yoga, spas, agricultural tourism, etc.), is set to be a $1,672.6 billion industry globally by 2030. Granted, calling something “wellness travel” can seem a little bit like using an Instagram filter—gussying up the same old thing with a glossier package—because there have always been spas, resorts, meditation retreats, fancy detox centers, and everything else that the Goop set has been frequented for years. What’s new about wellness travel, though, is that more and more people are choosing their vacations specifically with that in mind, not as a fun bonus—68% of people, in fact, according to a recent survey by American Express.
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For my own wellness extravaganza, I chose the top of the line: Hacienda AltaGracia, Auberge Resorts Collection, in Costa Rica. Nestled in the foothills of the Talamanca mountains, this sprawling 180-acre resort is peppered with 50 private casitas, multiple farm-to-table restaurants, miles of trails through its own rainforest, and the first international outpost of The Well, a wellness destination known for its creative and integrated take on wellness and If-You-Know-You-Know cache. Renovated and reopened in November 2021, Hacienda AltaGracia has already become one of the most talked-about wellness destinations in the world.
The Altagracia experience started as soon as I got off the plane in San Jose, Costa Rica. I was whisked to another, much smaller plane for a short flight through the mountains. Sitting in a tiny seat directly behind the two pilots, we flew over mountaintops, through rain clouds, and emerged onto the private landing strip on the resort property. The trip had the effect of immediately separating me mentally from my life back in New York, like some kind of mystic gateway to a new world completely unlike my everyday life. My personal compa Hardy (like a combination concierge, assistant, and guide) met me planeside and took me right away to my casita, on the way showing me the some 2,000 coffee plants on the property that will eventually grow beans exclusively for the resort ( coffee is huge in Costa Rica; like, really huge).
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The main reason I visited Hacienda AltaGracia was to go to The Well. I’m a fan of their spot in New York City, but they had promised me that this location would blow that one away. They were right. The moment I walked into the spa building at the top of the resort property, I was greeted by the Casa de Agua, a humongous indoor pool with a floor to ceiling panoramic view of the surrounding mountains and valley. I did the suggested pre-spa ritual which involved multiple showers, a steam room session, a custom-mixed clay mask smeared all over my body and then dried by lying on a heated marble slab. Then, after a swim in the pool, I was summoned for my Hierbas y Flores treatment, a body mask and wrap using local clay and indigenous herbs followed by a massage (they also do something called maderoterapia, a kind of body massage using wooden tools that’s traditional to the region).
On another day, I went down to the River Bath, an outdoor bathtub in the middle of the rainforest that has been built into the side of a river and is heated by a wood burning drum set in the water. After a coffee scrub, I washed off in the cold river water then climbed into the heated pool (calling it a tub would seriously under-describe the sheer size of that thing). I chose these treatments not just because I love baths and massages (I do), but because they’re unique to that location. Anyone can get a massage, but if you’re really going all-in on the wellness travel thing, I think it’s important to look for spa services and experiences that you can only get in the place you’re visiting. It helps not only open you up to new things, but also provides a new way to experience your location.
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But my visit wasn’t all just taking baths and getting massages. I realized that wellness travel is not just relaxing; it is about doing things that shift something inside you and make you feel different. During a guided nighttime walk through the rainforest, I thought about how I was seeing creatures (so, so many frogs) that I would never have seen otherwise and learning about an ecosystem completely foreign to my daily life. After I climbed a 90-foot tree to the high canopy of the rainforest to chill in a net at the very top, I thought about how I was experiencing a perspective of the world that few humans rarely see (and how I pushed through my fear to see it). During a sound bath and energy healing session, I was able to actually clear my mind for a little bit, something I have hardly ever done while meditating on my own. Even floating in my casita’s private pool at night by myself, I was able to see stars I haven’t seen for years living in New York City—and I didn’t reach for my phone to try to capture them for the ‘gram.
As I was puttering back over the mountains in that tiny plane heading home, it hit me. That’s really what wellness travel is about. After going on two full years of being inside, isolating, social distancing, and generally being afraid of the outside world, we are all craving new perspectives—I know I am, at least. It’s no longer enough to come back from vacation feeling rested and having finished a couple of beach reads. We want to feel fundamentally changed, like we did something genuinely worthwhile. Just like wellness isn’t one-size-fits-all, neither is wellness travel. A spa for one person could be just as exciting as trekking through the forest or biking to the top of a mountain. It could be learning about where the food you eat comes from or even helping to harvest it. Or it could be, like my experience, a little bit of all of that.
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