Hotel & Spa Larimar

The Hotel & Spa Larimar is at Panoramaweg 2, in the Fabitsgraben locality, on the ridge that looks down on Stegersbach, in southern Burgenland, at a little over three hundred metres of altitude. It is a family-run four-star superior hotel, known for its health programme with Indian ayurvedic doctors, the F.X. Mayr cure, detox and Chinese medicine, and for a thermal bath of its own of seven thousand square metres with nine pools, nine saunas and nine resting zones, plus a garden of eight thousand square metres.

The house is avowedly open to families: there are the Komfortsuite of forty-eight square metres with a separate bedroom, the Panoramablick and Westseite doubles of thirty-two, wooden cots with the child's name on them, changing tables and baby phones on request, a buffet and a menu for the little ones, the active zone in the garden with a barefoot path, a basket swing and a sandpit, and the koi carp pond with guided feeding twice a week in summer. The Saunawelt, though, opens only from the age of 16, and the same threshold applies to the panorama zone.

The Saunawelt, from the age of 16 and without swimwear

The rule is written without ambiguity: the whole Saunawelt is used as a nudist area. There are nine saunas. A Finnish one between 80 and 85 degrees with chromotherapy, a panoramic Finnish one with salt stones between 75 and 80, a herbal bio sauna at around 60, an infrared salt grotto with Himalayan salt at about 40, a brine steam bath with rose quartz at about 45, a herbal steam bath at about 45 with coconut foam ceremonies, an infrared sauna with a light bath at about 40, and finally the steam bath and the sanarium of the Ladies Spa, the part reserved for women, which also includes a massage pool at 32 degrees, two resting rooms and a panoramic roof garden, likewise swimwear-free.

Five of the nine pools are in the Saunawelt: the detox pool of sea water at 0.9 per cent salt at 36 degrees, with its blue wall of Himalayan salt; the thermal massage pool of the Saunafreihof, also at 36 degrees; the swimwear-free ten-metre pool with a bubble bench in the Sauna Panoramahof, at 28 degrees; the cold water grotto at 20 degrees; and the Ladies Spa pool. For cooling down there are also the ice fountain and the Kneipp foot pools of the ice room, and the spiral sensory showers. The resting rooms run from the nests on water beds of the Panoramaruheraum to the swimwear-free panoramic terrace, with a view of the hills and nobody looking in.

What is left for anyone under sixteen

The swimwear part of the thermal bath, which is no small thing: the indoor thermal pool at 36 degrees with underwater music, the outdoor one with jets and fountains, the outdoor pool of alkaline sea water at 32 degrees with counter-current swimming and the twenty-metre Infinity Sportpool at 28 degrees facing the countryside, as well as two hundred and fifty loungers indoors and as many in the garden.

Dogs are welcome, the only animals allowed: there are doubles with direct access to the garden, an agility course, a fenced area with a pond for swimming and a park for walks. It suits anyone who brings the children but still wants a real, silent sauna, and anyone looking for a health stay. It suits less anyone who will not give up swimwear in the sauna, because here that is not provided for.