Water and rest · salt baths

Salt baths in Bucovina

The water you float in without swimming. It has been done here for seven thousand years.

The difference from an ordinary pool is felt in the first minute: salt water holds you up. You stop fighting your own weight, and the joints work without being pressed. That is why these pools are full of older people, but also of children, who discover they can lie on the water doing nothing.

In Bucovina the habit is very old indeed. Archaeological research at Solca and Cacica has documented one of the oldest brine salt workings in Europe, dated to the fifth millennium before Christ, in the time of the Criș culture. The people of that age boiled the water of the salt springs to draw out the salt; we, seven thousand years later, step into it.

The Austrians industrialised it. In 1776, Major von Mieg reported two brine wells in Bucovina, and in 1783 a commission led by the aulic councillor Thadeus Peithner von Lichtenfels surveyed every salt spring in the province. In 1790 the Cacica deposit was found, and a year later mining began, with miners brought from Galicia.

Today there are two places where you actually step into salt water, twenty minutes apart, plus the leisure complex next to the salt mine.

What salt water actually does

FloatingHigh salinity increases buoyancy. The body sheds part of its weight, and the muscles around the spine let go. The feeling comes in the first few minutes and it is what everyone comes for.
The skinConcentrated salt water is among the few spa treatments tested in controlled studies. For psoriasis, the combination of salt baths with ultraviolet light has a Cochrane review of its own.
The jointsIn water you can work in ways you could not on dry land. Hence the indication for osteoarthritis and for the period after orthopaedic surgery.
What it does not doIt does not melt kilos and it does not replace a treatment. The effect is local, on the skin and on the locomotor system, and it lasts as long as you keep the rhythm.

Where to take salt baths in Bucovina

Two places, twenty minutes apart.

Cacica 49 km · 1 h The salt baths at Cacica Three places in the same village: the salt mine's open-air pool, the town hall's treatment centre and the leisure complex. The cheapest salt-water pool in Bucovina and the only one where treatments are also done, with a doctor. open-air pooltreatment centrephysiotherapyaqua parkfrom 10 lei See it all Solca 58 km · 1 h 10 Băile Sărate Solca The newest and most complete complex: indoor and outdoor pools with heated salt water all year round, a salt jacuzzi, a waterfall for neck massage, dry and wet sauna. indoor poolheated outdoor poolsalt jacuzzineck waterfallsaunaopen all year See it all

Further on

A base for these days out

All of it, less than an hour from the gate.

The house is in Câmpulung, in the middle of the map: the monasteries east, the mountains west, the steam train north. You don't drive far to get anywhere.

799 lei a night on Booking 599 lei / night See available dates