Dead Sea Spas

Dead Sea Spas draws water from the most mineral-concentrated lake on Earth's surface, on the shores of the Dead Sea in the Jordan Rift Valley, where the lake's chlorurated brine at approximately 34 percent salinity, ten times saltier than the ocean, carries concentrations of magnesium, potassium, calcium, and bromide that are unmatched by any other natural mineral water source in the world and have been valued for bathing and skin care in a tradition documented since the Roman period. The Dead Sea, sinking at approximately one metre per year as the Jordan River's inflow is diverted for agriculture and the hypersaline water evaporates in the desert heat, is experiencing an existential decline that has become one of the most dramatic environmental crises visible from space, its receding shoreline leaving behind sinkholes, abandoned beach facilities, and a widening salt-crusted desert that testifies to the unsustainability of the regional water politics that is consuming one of the world's most irreplaceable natural phenomena. Floating effortlessly on the Dead Sea surface, reading a newspaper in the buoyant brine while the Jordanian desert cliffs catch the morning light and the Israeli hills rise across the water in the narrow valley where the African and Arabian tectonic plates diverge, is one of the most geologically extraordinary bathing experiences on the planet, its sensory intensity matched only by its historical resonance in a landscape soaked in three thousand years of human civilisation.