Sep
21
2009
Portable Spas in Old Spain?
Author: SamWalking into your house and knowing that in a few moments you’ll be soaking in your very own spa is a wonderful feeling that never diminishes. Putting a portable spa in your yard means that you’ve decided to make pleasure and relaxation one of your top priorities. The needs of your family are more important than the needs of the outside world, and there is time to calm down, every day. Keep in mind that other people are very drawn to those who understand how to live the good life, so you may find yourself listening to a lot of old friends inviting themselves over. Portable spas can make entertaining groups rather easy, and it’s an excellent way to get conversations started.
The spa seems like a modern convenience, and something that belongs to our time in the history of the human race, but actually the roots are very deep. The tradition of the bath goes back for centuries, and across cultures. When speaking of baths in antiquity, it is probably more accurate to say they were a bit more like our spas than our notion of a bathtub. Famous baths in Rome were places where people would gather to enjoy the healthy physical and social benefits of spending time in the water together. Some of the most elaborate baths belong to Islamic culture, where there is a blend of the Roman ideas with the earlier Asian traditions to make a fascinating ritual with amazing architecture.
There are several houses in traditional Islamic baths, typically three, with varying degrees of water, from warm to hot. There was also typically a container of cool water. For the bathers, moving from one temperature to another was supposed to have healing qualities and was excellent for maintaining cleanliness. Contemporary science suggests that these ideas were all indeed correct, and the old notions of bathing are very similar to our own. It is a sort of double luxury, then, to have a spa with all the technologies of today, blended with ideas that go back for centuries.