Euphoria Retreat

Ideally, you want to take yourself on a spa retreat when you most need it. As we move into a new busy season with all the stress that brings, I’m thinking wistfully of the three days I spent early last July at Euphoria Retreat, when summer felt wide open and unscripted and I was looking more for hedonism than for healing…but found the healing part anyway.

Euphoria is in Mystras, on the Peloponnese, a criminally underrated part of Greece that’s every bit as beautiful as the islands with a fraction of the crowds. Plus, this is where many of the big historical hits are, from ancient Corinth to the theater at Epidaurus. While you can fly into nearby Kalamata, Athens is only 2.5 hours away. So I was picked up at my Athens hotel by Euphoria’s Tesla Model Y and noiselessly whisked across the canal connecting the Ionian and Aegean seas (you should stop to watch the boats gliding along their narrow path underneath), through rolling olive groves backed by mountain peaks to the village of Mystras, near Sparta. The town is a leafy square surrounded by cafes and charming houses sagging with flower boxes, where fresh water pours out from underground caves into a spigot built into a tree that you can drink from—just one sign of this region’s freakishly healthy pedigree, which also includes its famous, life-extending olive oil. Euphoria is built into the foot of a wooded mountain behind the town and is unmarked, since the town is a UNESCO World Heritage site…which only heightened the feeling as we glided through its gates that I was entering some kind of ancient healing cabal.

The spa is actually conceived around two ancient healing methods. The brainchild of Marina Efraimoglou, a former investment banker who had cancer in her twenties and turned to Traditional Chinese Medicine and Greek holistic medicine for healing, the retreat is shaped around an alchemy of the two, which converge in the concept of the Five Elements. The spa is a physical homage to this idea, starting with the central “water well”—a black-stone foot bath that you’re encouraged to walk meditatively around before ascending a 4-story white tower like some kind of de Chirico fever dream towards a skylight. Each circular floor leads to a suite of treatment rooms with saunas, steam chambers, a flotation tank, cold plunges and a watsu pool. The showstopper is the Sphere Pool, which is contained within two halves of a sphere that resembles a split bowling ball – on top, a dome pocked with light-filled oculi (stay with me) and below it, a 3.5-meter-deep curved bottom that I spent a silly amount of time trying to dive down and touch. (The sounds of whales and dolphins are piped in.) On the practical side, guests take an inventory (“Do you feel anger easily?” “Do you feel heavy headed?”) whose answers correlate with each of the five elements (fire, earth, metal, water wood) that help determine your treatment protocol. For those who want to go deeper, there’s a homeopathic doctor and nutritionist on staff and various multi-day programs that involve blood work and all that, including a detox regimen, which most people around me seemed to be on.

Each morning I went for a group hike—one day it was the Trypi springs, a walk through the woods to a waterfall that was so clear you could count the pebbles on the floor of the pool. On another, it was a hike through a steep wooded gorge along a ledge that was so narrow and thrillingly unprotected, two of my companions took to clutching the side of the rock. Back at Euphoria, I alternated between lazing in the spa’s many (usually empty) spaces (tepidarium, salt room) and hands-on treatments. Most memorable: the “Sanctuary for Busy Minds,” a massage designed to quiet the fear-based hypothalamus that involved much pinching of the toes to open the energy channels, a Turkish hammam where I was loofahed with giant clouds of black-soap suds, and classes like “Free Your Voice,” in which a Greek drama teacher taught us to breathe from parts of the body I never imagined could respire. Because the building backs onto a wooded mountain, it was also pleasant to just sit on the terrace of my room with a book and let the raucous chirp of the cicadas and the warm herbaceous breeze lull me into a nap.

I loved that every meal began with herbal water infusions: energizing thyme in the morning, oregano, which helps digestion, for lunch, and relaxing rosemary with dinner. The chef, Sarantos Rapatas, is a local from Sparta who did a stint at Noma and his recipes were simple but tasty, all made from local ingredients and based on the Mediterranean Diet. In summer this meant lots of salads and soups for those who were detoxing (beetroot, broccoli, carrot and ginger) with plenty to fill up on for those who weren’t—lamb chops and orzo with seafood—though surprisingly often for those who were, too. (No one starved.) There was plenty of Greek wine for us hedonists, too.

Most of the guests were British, with a couple of Americans and internationals, and I fell in, as one does, with a few guests who were all there as solo voyagers—one of them, Mark, a convivial interior designer who lives in the South of France, had come for his third visit. He had spent several weeks at Euphoria during Covid, which he described as a sort of magic mountain of people who had escaped to this sweet-smelling, isolated paradise as the virus marched around the world, and I tapped him as my guide: of the menu (“the surprise is the vegan stuffed cabbage—delicious!”), of which treatment not to miss (watsu). While most of the modern, blonde-wood guest rooms are in the modern main building, I preferred the rooms in the old stone mansion from the 1830s that the hotel was built around—more rustic and vernacular in style. (My only bone to pick with the place is the décor is blandly modern in some places and veers a little too Arabian Nights in others.)

I was especially glad that Mark had convinced me to stop before leaving at the nearby hilltop archeological site of Mystras, a fortified Byzantine city and major silk producer dating to the 13^th century that once flourished as the administrative seat of Byzantine Empire in the Peloponnese, attracting writers, artisans, and philosophers. You can drive (or hike) to the acropolis and make your way down to the lower city, ducking into small stone churches covered in brightly colored frescoes, a palace and a small museum. I would find myself alone in each of these ancient churches gazing up at the choirs of gold-haloed angels, in their ochre and terracotta gowns, healers of a sort peering down from another space and time. I wish I could go back now that I really need it! The good thing is it’s open year round, since the script’s not yet written on winter.