Europe’s top wellness escapes: These are the spas to visit for your 2026 wellness fix

Sylt, Germany
Best for: expert blending of medicine and holistic health

Just off Germany’s northern coast, Sylt is a playground with 25 miles of sugar-soft sands, boutiques and restaurants. Northern Germans flock here year after year. It’s truly charming: dunes coated with marram grass and heathers, and the sky a shade of cornflower. In the northern village of List, on the cusp of Königshafen lagoon, is Lanserhof Sylt, an outpost of Europe’s grandest Mayr-style spa brand. It has the trappings of a regular spa – saltwater pool, Technogym space, climbing wall, yoga studio, sauna and steam rooms, library and indoor-outdoor lounges – but there are also white-clad medics striding around white corridors with stethoscopes, manning CT and ultrasound scanners, ECG monitors, IV lounges and colonic hydrotherapy suites. The name of the game is “vital ageing” – facing life’s declines with grace using diagnostics, Western and holistic medicine, diet and exercise.

At the heart of a stay for the majority is the Mayr Cure, a simple process of purging one’s guts of toxins, acidity and bad bacteria through fasting, invented by the Austrian physician Franz X Mayr in 1915. Guests follow the mainly plant-based, alkalising Lanserhof Energy Cuisine diet, taking Epsom salts to clear out the digestive system; and alkaline powder to neutralise acids. Beyond that, the programme – how radical the diet, what treatments to follow – is decided by the doctor. It’s not easy; the Cure can purges me of more than bad gut bacteria. I cry constantly, bemoaning the griefs of my life. Then, after three days of sleep and misery, I blink awake. I am up with the moon. The nausea has vanished. I wallow in steam rooms, and pluck books from the library. I start biking to swim in sun-kissed seas at Kampen Beach – these are golden days of the bluest skies, the perfect 23 ̊C and a gentle breeze. It is impossible to feel sick, sad, or hangry here. There is nothing to do but sink into the sand, allow the warmth to kiss my detoxifying skin and revel in being alive with a rapidly improving microbiome. Lydia Bell

Healing Holidays (healingholidays.com/condenast) can arrange a seven-night Lanserhof Cure Classic programme from £3,979 per person sharing, including transfers, full board and treatments