dronepicr, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
Spa
Two treatment rooms in the old cistern
The cistern held the house's water until 1968. It is nine metres long, cut into the rock, and it stays at nineteen degrees in August without help.
We put two treatment rooms in it and left everything else alone — the vault, the plaster, the step worn into a curve by two hundred years of buckets.
There is no gym, no sauna, no juice bar and no playlist. There are two therapists, Maria and Eleni, and there are never more than two.
What we use
Thermal water, sea salt, and oil from the next valley
Milos is volcanic, so the water that comes out of the ground here comes out warm and full of sulphur. It is why the Romans came and why the island had a spa hotel in 1936.
The salt is raked at Pollonia by a family who have done it for four generations. The oil is pressed eight kilometres away, in October, and we buy the year's supply in one go.
Treatments
Six things, done properly
Book the day before at reception, or when you book the room. Prices are per person and include the use of the cistern for an hour afterwards.
The long one
Ninety minutes, oil, no conversation unless you start it. The thing most people come back for.
€110
Shoulders and neck
Forty minutes, firm, for people who drove here from the airport with a stiff back.
€55
Salt scrub
Thirty minutes with Pollonia salt and oil, finished in the cistern. Do it on your first day, not your last.
€45
After the sun
Aloe cut from the garden, cool cloths, twenty-five minutes. Free if you burned on one of our boats.
€35
Two at once
Both rooms, both therapists, ninety minutes. Book it two days ahead; there are only two of them.
€210
The cistern alone
An hour in the water with nobody else in it. Bookable in the morning only.
€20
The practicalities
Small enough that the diary fills
Two rooms and two therapists means about fourteen treatments a day at the outside. In August that is gone by lunchtime, so book when you book the room.
