A banker who changed her mind
Euphoria is the work of one person's second thoughts. Marina Efraimoglou spent a career in finance, built banks, priced risk for a living. Then illness arrived, twice, and she went looking for a different way of understanding the body. She studied Chinese medicine. Years of that reading and a good deal of her own money went into this place, which opened in July 2018 as Greece's first true destination spa.
She chose the site with care. It sits in a private forest on the lower flank of Mount Taygetos, directly below the Byzantine ghost-city of Mystras, all fallen palaces and painted churches on the hill above. The philosophy she settled on marries two traditions that do not usually share a building, ancient Greek thought and the Chinese theory of five elements, wood and fire and earth and metal and water. Written down it can read like a brochure. Walked through, it holds, because the retreat is built to the idea rather than around a menu of treatments.
She had spent a career pricing risk. Then she priced her own, and walked.
Four floors down into the rock
The spa is the reason to come, and it is enormous: three thousand square metres sunk into the hillside across four levels, so that you descend to it rather than walk in. At the centre is the Sphere Pool, a stone dome closed over warm water that drops to four metres at its deepest point, lit so a swimmer hangs in it the way the one on our cover does, weightless and a little lost. Around it the building keeps going, a Byzantine hammam, a salt room, saunas, and the Waterwell, a spiral you walk barefoot for the old Kneipp business of hot water and cold.
It is theatrical, and it knows it. There is a version of this that would tip into performance, and on a tired evening it can feel like a great deal of programme to submit to. Submit anyway. The scale is the point: you are meant to feel that you have gone somewhere, physically, down and in, before anything is asked of you.
You go down to get better. The building means it literally.
What you come back up to
There are forty-five rooms and suites, and they are quieter than the spa, which is right. Pale oak, soft stone, carved headboards, and windows that frame the cypresses and the mountain instead of shouting over them. Nothing in them competes with what you have just done four floors below. You sleep well, which in a place selling wellbeing ought to be table stakes and often is not.
Dining is at Gaia, contemporary Greek and Mediterranean cooking that leans on organic Peloponnese produce, a lot of it from the property's own garden. The hardest thing a spa kitchen has to manage is to feed you properly without turning dinner into a lecture or a punishment. This one manages it. You eat lightly and you eat well, and by the end of the week the two stop feeling like opposites.
Feed a guest well without lecturing them. Most wellness kitchens cannot. This one can.
Greece has spas the way France has vineyards, but nearly all of them are a pool and a treatment list bolted onto a good hotel. Euphoria is the rare one built the other way round, from an idea outward, on a site that could be nowhere else on earth. You leave lighter, and lighter in the way the founder meant rather than the way the scales report it. Come for the thinking as much as the water. That is why it is in VANE.
