On a hike to the top of Sierra Helada, the Mediterranean Sea sprawls out to the fuzzy horizon. Turn a little to the right, though, and there’s a different sprawl: a burst of tall buildings that my hiking mate, Irina, declares the spitting image of Dubai. Irina, wearing one of those Cartier necklaces that look like a bent nail with diamonds covering the head, stands next to me on this mountain in Spain, above a modern medical spa called the Sha Wellness Clinic—in Irina’s case, via Holland and Russia; in mine, via stress and sleeplessness.
That Dubai-like town is Benidorm, a vacation spot so devoted to the British tourism industry that it’s dotted with pubs advertising full English breakfasts and beer buckets around the clock.
Benidorm is to partying what Sha is to detoxing. Upside-down-lands, just five miles and a world apart.
I am at Sha for the Rebalance program. The word “rebalance” suggests that, once upon a time, I was balanced and that I am now on the Bongo Board of life, hovering shakily at one end, poised for the inevitable crash. And how nice that Sha is right there, ready to catch me in its warm, muscular, professionally white-coated arms.
But before any coddling, there is the business of data. So much data. So much collecting. I stand on a platform as if I’m playing Dance Dance Revolution. But, instead, my body rotates in a circle as a camera peers into my soul, tallying my muscle mass, fat mass, visceral fat, bone density, cellular-water ratio, and glyco-oxidation, whatever that is. Sha is to health data what Dave & Buster’s is to arcade games.
“And now, we give you the cognitive test,” says the pleasantly efficient technician.
Oh, no, we don’t. After 11 hours of travel, 2.3 of them spent sleeping, I am not about to put my brain through any kind of test that would result in a score. Not before I’ve weaned myself off caffeine; not before I’ve limbered up my synapses with the entire fleet of New York Times puzzles.
Let me cut to the chase: three days later, I bomb the cognitive test. But it isn’t my fault. The technician clicks her nails and breathes loudly, and who could possibly focus with all that racket?
The other cognitive test is finding your way to each appointment on the hour. There’s the Orient room and the Occident room, the Harmony room and the Balance room. Isn’t balance synonymous with harmony? I settle myself in Harmony and realize 10 minutes later that I’m supposed to be in Orient, and even on day four I’m still disoriented. Steps are registered on my phone, tens of thousands of steps, many of them accumulated by dashing upstairs, then turning around and running downstairs. Have I mentioned that I bomb the cognitive test?
The property is horizontal and clinically white with lots of glass, fountains, multiple pools, and a sense of luxurious efficiency. My room is grand with a broad terrace and my own personal hot tub. It would be the ideal spot for debauchery, but I drop into bed at 10 p.m. with an herbal tea. There’s a small cinema for nightly movies and a chapel just in case, but I imagine attendance is scant. On Saturday night, a torch singer serenades us as we eat our beans and tofu, and the guests dress up a bit. I don’t get this memo and arrive late from a deep-tissue massage, my hair slicked with oil.
With all these tests, cognitive and otherwise, Sha seems at first like a medical competition rather than a spa. And that’s because it isn’t like any spa I’ve been to and may not be a spa at all. When Sha was conceived, 15 years ago, “the purpose was to create the most comprehensive method to transform your health and well-being in a simple and pleasant way,” says Alejandro Bataller, the vice president of Sha and son of its founder. It’s less outdoorsy and less sweaty than an American spa. “Europeans are O.K. with moderate exercise, to call it in an elegant way.”
I stand on a platform as if I’m playing Dance Dance Revolution. But, instead, my body rotates in a circle as a camera peers into my soul.
They also seem slightly less weight-obsessed. I want to drop at least five pounds without an Ozempic prescription, and the doctor tells me not to worry: “Your weight is fine.” And just like that, I stop worrying. At Sha I don’t hear a peep about calorie counts or fat grams, and no one weighs and measures you at the end of your stay so they can send you off with a before-and-after report card.
The newest attraction at spas is sexual wellness. Sha doesn’t half-ass it, offering gynecologists, urologists, pelvic-floor specialists, and hormone experts. In the initial consultation, “we ask, How is your sexual life, do you have problems?,” Cinthya Molina, a clinical psychologist and head of the unit, tells me. And from there, she enumerates the wonders of vibrators. “I say it’s fine, you can self-stimulate. I never say ‘masturbate’ because, depending on the culture, masturbation is connected with shame or guilt. And I give them permission to do it. Not for the men. They don’t need it.”
To put things in Sha terms, she extols the health benefits of sex. “To have an orgasm is going to help you with your pelvic floor, it’s going to help you with your blood flow, it’s going to help you with your mood, it’s going to help you with your sleep, it’s going to help you with your dopamine. And they’re like, ‘O.K., the doctor told me I have to.’ Yes, I make it a prescription.”
To improve things for the ladies, Sha has an Emsella chair that pings your pelvic floor with electromagnetic waves, doing the work of more than 10,000 Kegels while you flip through the latest issue of Sha Magazine.
There is no limit to the ways you can stimulate, activate, alleviate, mitigate, and moderate every tense or flaccid muscle, organ, and thought, and the good people at Sha are dead set on hitting every last one. Sometimes the treatments seem like something Stefon dreamed up, with seaweed wraps followed by a high-powered hosing, cupping, electromagnetic facial, hot-stone massage on a bed of pebbles, and inflatable pants that squeeze your legs over and over. By day three, your lymphatic system is begging for mercy.
There’s a goofy aqua-aerobics class where you straddle a foam noodle—which the teacher calls, cruelly, “churros”—and wheel your legs to “Old Town Road.” There’s a V.R. exercise machine that you lie on like a praying mantis. It’s called Icarus and rhymes (poorly) with “ridiculous” until you realize that it’s much harder than it looks.
The food is mostly macrobiotic and heavy on the tofu and seaweed: miso soup at breakfast, whipped tofu and roasted leeks at lunch, buckwheat crêpes, lentils and beans, roasted-vegetable stews, and sometimes sea bass. A series of coconut-based flans, panna cottas, and ice creams outdo each other in inventiveness and glossy beauty—smooth and just the right amount of sweet. Everything is plated in the manner of a Michelin-starred showplace, with sprigs of microgreens and tiny edible flowers.
Sometimes I can’t finish my meal, which has never happened in the history of my eating meals. My six-foot-five-inch son and travel companion asks for extra protein and still wakes up one night, apparently in the throes of keto flu. The next morning, he runs to Benidorm in hopes of bangers and mash only to find the convenience store has just candy and beer.
At Sha, water has many shapes and temperatures. Water is wet and also strangely dry, blasting cold and blazing hot. My favorite activity of the many activities at Sha is to parboil in the Roman steam bath until I can’t breathe, then dunk into the cold plunge, head submerged. My son and I do this almost every day until we work up to three minutes in the cold plunge and brag about it to each other.
When that isn’t cold enough, we grab a pile of crushed ice and rub it on our faces and arms. The only place where water is in short supply is the dining room, where we are advised not to drink it with meals because it interferes with digestion. Instead, we start each dinner with a shot of apple-cider vinegar, clinking glasses and emptying them in one wincing gulp.
For my trip home, Sha packs me a picnic, and I sit with my yogurt parfait in the Alicante airport before winding through security. Across from me is a man who has the same idea. He takes a tipple from a bottle of Beefeater gin and shoots me a look of complicity. “Honestly, after the last two days, I don’t even know my name,” he says, his Yorkshire accent slurring. Cheers to that.
Linda Wells is the Editor at Air Mail Look