Hemingway Baths – a place where the Caribbean atmosphere will never stray far from “The old man and the sea”.
Havanna Bath & Spa is now open! Every day between 10am – 10pm. Entrance fee 300 SEK/person (200 SEK/person for overnight guests). Call us on 0340 10050 to book.
[get_sidebar name=bathclosed]At Hotel Havanna the spa is a wonderfully unusual creation. Beneath the hotel itself, we’ve dug out an underground section and created Havanna Bath & Spa. A spa inspired by the Cuba lover and author Ernest Hemingway – a man, who incidentally also loved bathing, in both sea, pool or tub.
Down here we have a pool (7 x 4m), jacuzzi, foot spa, steam room, traditional sauna and steam baths. We have a number of treatment rooms where we offer a range a treatments. The entire facilities are furnished and decorated with tens of thousands Moroccan tiles in typical designs, patterns and rich colours.
Old spa town
Varberg has a 200 year long history of spa traditions. Since the 19th century, people have been coming here for saltwater bathing and spa treatments. The old baths of Varberg are still very much part of the town with buildings like Varmbadhuset (the warm water baths) dating back to 1925 and the glorious Kallbadhuset (open air sea baths) in Moorish style from 1903. In surroundings like this, it’s goes without saying that every self-respecting hotel must have a spa!
The spa hotel
Hotel Havanna is a genuine spa hotel, not least because of the location. From the hotel you only have a few minutes gentle walk to the sea front promenade and the beaches there. If you want, you can skip the bathing suit and just stroll down – classic summer tourist style – in nothing but your bathrobe for an early morning dip at Goda Hopp (the nude bathing place for gentlemen) or Skarpe Nord (for ladies). To start your day in the salty Kattegat will undoubtedly set the tone for the day.
Bathing opportunities galore…
A bit further along the promenade, you’ll find Simstadion with its open air swimming pools, then Varberg Fortress and Barnens Badstrand (the children’s beach) – and in the other direction there’s the surfers’ and holiday makers’ paradise, Apelviken. In a nutshell: there are bathing opportunities all over the place!
Did Hemingway like bathing?
Yes, we are daring enough to claim he did! Ernest Hemingway and his second wife Pauline bought their house in Key West in Florida in 1931. The Hemingway Villa was soon adorned with a fantastic pool – the only one for several miles.
The house was also the first on the island that had running water and a bathroom on the first floor.
After a little more than 10 years in Key West, Hemingway bought his farm on Cuba – Finca Vigia – where he would stay for 20 years. He put in a swimming pool and a proper bathroom here too. On the wall right next to the bathtub, there are a lot of handwritten numbers – those are traces from the author, who regularly measured and noted down both weight and blood pressure.
As a child, Hemingway lived in Chicago, far away from the sea. But when he was eleven years old, he spent a whole month with his mom by the coast in Nantucket. He swam in the sea every day and his mother then talked about her little boy’s “wild shrieks of joy” while jumping in the waves.
Safely back at school, the little boy Hemingway wrote his first short story with the title: “My First Sea Vogue”.
