Some hot springs look like buildings, others like holes in the ground. To some they seem like celebrations, to others they like prayers. There are hot baths in cities, on remote islands, in the desert, inside dense forests. Thermal water can be green, orange, blue, yellow or turquoise. It can be milky and opaque, silty with sediment or as clear as a municipal swimming pool. Sometimes it is barely warm; other times it’s so hot it hurts.
Several years ago, with the dream of making a book, I decided to learn and document how people around the world use thermal waters. At 23 locations in 12 countries, I spoke with workers, stewards and experts, who taught me about the local history and personality of each location. Many have spoken to me about how they manage land and water as a collective. They explained how the presence of bathing places can influence bodies, communities and cultures.
I have met visitors who have told me how warm water softens their minds and muscles. Some, like me (and perhaps like you), were enthusiastic with a certain devotion to hot water, fascinated by the way it reminded them of being citizens of nature.
Below are eight highlights adapted from my book “Hot Springs” – from an onsen in Aomori Prefecture, Japan, to a series of high-altitude pools near Mount Sajama, Bolivia.
Aomori, Japan
When I was 14, my parents, both teachers, began working as teachers at a United States Air Force base in Misawa, Japan. I attended base high school and we lived in a small house between a potato field and a rice field. The few local onsen, or public hot spring baths, were so different from the hot springs I had been to back home in Idaho, open-air and sometimes a little rowdy places.
In Japan, hot springs are ritualized and structured. In an onsen there is a palpable sense of reverence for one’s body, for others and for the water.
I learned how to use the onsen properly: bring a small stool and bowl to the shared shower area, scrub every inch of my body, shampoo and condition my hair, clean between my toes and under my nails, rinse the my body and the area I occupied.
Once cleaned, you soak. You soak until your body turns red with heat. And even inside you feel purified.
Ponta da Ferraria, Azores
Ponta da Ferraria is located on the westernmost point of the island of São Miguel, in the Azores, where volcanic hills slope sharply towards the ocean. Thermal cove, it can only be reached at low tide, when the waves are not too violent and the hot water is not diluted by the rising sea.
Heat comes and goes with each set of waves. Swimmers hold tight to ropes that hover over the surface of the water, providing stability as the waves move their bodies like strands of seaweed. People gasp and cheer as each wave approaches. It’s daunting and thrilling to be on the edge of nature like this.
When the tide rises, people climb a ladder onto the black rock ledge, with the sea still raging beneath them, shivering in the wind, wrapping themselves in towels and wringing the water out of their hair. They are animated by adrenaline, wild-eyed and added with wonder.
Himachal Pradesh, India
Every day at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., a priest named Mahant Shiv Giri performs puja, a series of religious rites, at a small temple at hot springs near the Gaj River in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh .
First he bathes in the hot springs, washing his body and face in the thermal water. “The meaning of bathing is to purify yourself,” she said. “It’s a way to underline your presence in the house of God.”
Many of Himachal Pradesh’s other hot springs are also found in and around temple structures. In the larger town of Manikaran, Sikh and Hindu temples sit next to each other on the banks of the Parvati River, sharing the same powerful hot spring.
Uunartoq Hot Spring, Greenland
The stone-dammed pool at Uunartoq Hot Spring is a ruin, most likely built by Norwegian settlers a thousand years ago. It may have been the only place to soak in warm water for generations of Greenlanders. For a millennium, people have rested their bodies in the same place, finding warmth in the cold just as they do today.
Uunartoq is registered under the protection of historical, natural and cultural heritage. But all of Greenland is managed uniquely: no one can own the land there. All land can only be borrowed, with the terms of its use agreed upon cooperatively.
Land use in Greenland, explained Arctic sociologist Naja Carina Steenholdt, is “rooted in a very traditional and very indigenous view of our nature.”
And Dr. Steenholdt emphasized that Greenland’s approach can be part of modern life. Greenlandic society, he said, operates on the principle of sharing everything: land, food, time, care.
Mount Sajama, an extinct volcano and Bolivia’s highest mountain at more than 21,000 feet, rises in a windswept, high-altitude valley dotted with simple homes, herds of llamas, a central village, and a few hot spots geothermal.
Micaela Billcap owns a plot of land with a hot spring, but it is collectively managed and managed by the community, who share in the profits.
“Sajama is a doctor,” said Marcelo Nina Osnayo, who grew up in the area. The hot springs are also considered medicinal, a balm for the hard-working people of the area.
The climate at such high altitudes is harsh and the daily work is incessant. Marcelo told me that his wife developed arthritis after working in a kitchen where there was only cold water. “When we went to the waterholes, she would move in her bones,” she said. “They contain many minerals, such as sulfur, arsenic, potassium and salt. “It’s a mixture of medicines.”
Nevada is home to more than 300 natural geothermal springs. But only about 40 of them are safe and accessible for soaking. There’s a heart-shaped hot spring, a hot spring in a converted livestock watering hole, a languid hot spring river, and a deep pool overlooking Joshua trees and rabbits. Each requires a spirit of adventure, a little research and a little luck.
(The hot springs I visited in Nevada are the only purely wild hot springs in the book, the only bathing places without someone to grant admission or control the flow of visitors. For this reason, to avoid overuse, I have decided not to share specific names of the pools there.)
Springs can be well maintained or destroyed by careless visitors or wandering livestock; roads may be too rough for passage; the climate is too hot in summer or too cold in winter. But when you choose the right moment, the air smells of mugwort and the silence is so pure you can hear your ears drumming.
Riemvasmaak, South Africa
In 1973 and 1974, during South African apartheid, black residents of Riemvasmaak, a settlement in northwestern South Africa, were uprooted from their homes so the government could build a military site. Among these residents were Henry Basson and his family forcibly transferred to northern Namibia.
For decades the community’s territory was occupied by the armed forces, to train infantry and practice bombing. In the 1990s, when Namibia gained independence and Nelson Mandela was elected to South Africa, Riemvasmaak became one of South Africa’s first repatriated lands.
“Coming back was a very emotional experience,” Basson said, “because of that sense of belonging.”
Now the director of the area’s hot springs, Mr. Basson always takes a dip whenever it’s time to clean up, soaking in the small pools found beneath towering cliffs. “We give ourselves a chance to be in the water and feel it,” he said.
This is his true home, where the story of his ancestors continues. But he tells me that this type of connection with the earth is within anyone’s reach. “When you visit a hot spring, or any other place, don’t come just for a happy thing,” he said. “Try to make that connection.”
“In a hot spring, you disconnect from the things that rush you and reconnect with nature itself,” he added.
7132 Spa, Switzerland
The bathrooms at Hotel 7132 in Vals, Switzerland are an austere brutalist sanctuary dedicated to hot water. Designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, the complex was built with 60,000 locally sourced quartzite slabs. The stone is warm to the touch, it absorbs sounds so that everything is muffled, reverent, almost ecclesial.
Bathing in hot springs can involve complex practices. But the baths of Vals remind us that it is precisely the bath itself that constitutes the ritual. Perhaps there is no need for ceremony when soaking is enough.
No cell phones or cameras are allowed in the bathrooms, but I got permission from the staff to photograph the area while it was being cleaned. The cleaners are specialists, they use specific cloths and sprays for each surface. They explained their careful techniques and how it took trial and error over time to figure them out.
I thought about how our sacred and special places require work and maintenance, the ongoing negotiation of personality, politics, and place. This is also part of the ritual.
Greta Rybus is a photojournalist based near Portland, Maine. His bookHot Springs: Photos and Stories of How the World Gets Wet, Swims, and Slows Down”, from which this photo essay is based, will be published by Ten Speed Press on March 19.