Vancouver Island's best spas: floating saunas, salt caves and a 90-minute hot-springs boat ride

Vancouver Island runs on a slower current than most of Canada's Pacific coast — and lately that current has turned into a full-blown spa circuit. Condé Nast Traveler's Adrienne Matei just mapped the route, calling it a "spa safari" that strings together floating bathhouses, subterranean hydrotherapy caves and geothermal hot springs reached only by boat. Here's the itinerary to copy.

Start in Victoria at HAVN, a sauna experience built on a refurbished naval barge moored in the city harbor. You work through a cold plunge, then scrub down with magnesium-infused salt while a float plane touches down in front of you, then linger in a robe at the onboard café over a turmeric elixir.

The immersive caves and the kelp tubs

A few hours' drive north, the Kingfisher Pacific Resort & Spa has been a wellness landmark for two decades thanks to its subterranean hydrotherapy circuit. In late 2024 it added the Healing Caves, a 75-minute journey through a plumeria-scented steam room, a glowing pink salt cave, a cryotherapy chamber and a storm pool where simulated thunder and lightning roll overhead. Only three of these immersive spas exist in the world — the others are in Macau and Milan.

Further west, near Tofino's remote coves, sits Moon Jelly Bathhouse, a float home reached by a 15-minute skiff ride. Its wood-fired tubs — one freshwater, one ocean salt — are filled with three varieties of local kelp, an idea borrowed from traditional Irish seaweed bathing that turns the water into a "nutritive dashi broth." You're left alone to alternate between hot soaks and cannonballs into the ocean.

Where the spa becomes a safari

For the wildest stop, West Coast Aquatic Safaris runs a 90-minute boat journey northwest from Tofino to Hot Springs Cove in Maquinna Marine Provincial Park — a geothermal site the Ahousaht Nation calls mux̣ʷšiƛa, "steaming from rock." The route doubles as wildlife watching: orcas, bald eagles, barking sea lions and rafts of sea otters. A boardwalk leads through old-growth forest to the fault itself, where ocean water is heated underground and released through fissures into stepped natural tubs.

Matei ends at the off-grid Clayoquot Wilderness Lodge, reachable only by floatplane or boat, where spruce-scented open-air showers, glacial cold plunges and a Healing Grounds spa sit on the edge of Bedwell Sound. As the lodge's senior therapist put it after working on her resistant fascia: "I see you have a gift."

Other stops worth booking: the ocean-front Cedar Sanctuary at the Wickaninnish Inn's Ancient Cedars Spa, and Tofino Resort & Marina's wood-fired Remote Floating Sauna, a 30-minute boat ride out where the only neighbors are seals.