If the purpose of going to a spa is to relax, the "womb" spa in Gran Canaria has taken the concept to its conclusion because it wants to return you, metaphorically, to the womb, where there is no heartbreak, no dry skin, and no advertising. Unborn babies are always relaxed. According to its publicity blurb, this spa has a room designed to look like a womb – whose womb in particular, I know not. Maybe they asked a wombologist to design a photogenic womb – I don't know that either. But spas, like all luxury services, are expanding, so you cannot blame them for ever more bizarre marketing tics.
Gran Canaria is a sun-blasted rock, dedicated to impersonating the neon bits of London. It reminds me of a freestanding Trocadero, but surrounded by the Atlantic. If there is an "old" bit, I do not see it, because I am driven to a strip of huge and grandiose hotels, all standing together, like giant women preparing for a hen night. It is fiercely luxurious and modern, with a smorgasbord of Europeans wearing leisurewear. Everyone looks like Tom Jones and wife.
I am staying at the Lopesan Villa del Conde Resort & Corallium Thalasso – big name, big hotel. It has an enormous, double-turreted entrance building – Xanadu in Citizen Kane. The guests, mostly in bathrobes, are dwarfed by the surroundings. Outside they lie by the meandering pools, in the sort of sun that blisters you if you stick your hand in it, so quite a few people are striped, like raspberry zebras. I am no particular fan of resort living, but this is lush and glassy. The hotel could swallow me. Even the children's screams – in German, French, Italian – are muted.
The spa is a series of private pools overlooking the ocean. I am scrubbed, massaged and stuck in a pool until I feel like a large, well-cared-for fish. This feels ridiculous to write, but spa living exhausts me, possibly because I am not used to it, preferring a diet of caffeine, deadline and anxiety. Every treatment drains a little more energy, until I end up feeling like Joan Didion contemplating the Vietnam War – and in a spa. What else to say? I'm wet now.
A car is sent, in case a five-minute walk past more monumental hotels is beyond me. I am driven to a neighbouring but seemingly identical hotel – the Lopesan Costa Meloneras Resort, Corallium Spa & Casino – bigger name, bigger hotel. The spa, I realise, is actually a theme park. It is a series of rooms, numbered on a map like at Thorpe Park, and the rooms are ever more bizarre. It is called a "hyper-thermal circuit", where you experience both hot and cold, and it is "inspired by the volcanic conditions on the island", the real volcanic conditions being too unsafe to spa in.
It is arranged around a dim hallway, with pot plants and Moorish lamps. Apart from the couples in bathrobes holding hands and rehydrating together – and the lack of a piano – we could be in Rick's bar, Casablanca. There is no particular order for doing the rides, I mean rooms, because this is Gran Canaria, not Austria. (I say this because I have been to an Austrian diet clinic where, if you touched the dining room door handle, you got an electric shock.) First I bathe my feet in a sort of wall installation, with icy water. This would be profound and therapeutic, except that I can see the check-in desk, and they can see me.
One room is made entirely of rock, with hanging rock formations , and a warm, dark pool of water. But I cannot just sit in the pool, because I have decided, thanks to terrible films like Conan the Barbarian (not even the original, the remake), that there may be a mythical sea beast in the pool, and it may eat me, or just kill me and not eat me, it being full of other spa victims. That is what happens when spa designers try too hard. When you spa, you are in quite a vulnerable place emotionally, and thus prone to primal fantasies of annihilation.
Another room has a floor coated in salt, which I am tempted to steal, just as I am sometimes tempted to steal toilet paper. Another has backlit crystal walls and a vast, glowing crystal in the centre; the photos promised naked men waving, but there are none. And so back to the womb, a journey I've never actually wanted to make, except perhaps in the company of a skilled psychotherapist. I mean – I like my mother. I don't really want to bash my way in again, even in metaphor, because I am 37, and it would be rude.
Anyway, it is a large, curved homage to expensive carpetry, with red-draped waterbeds and very red walls. I wish I had been privy to the meeting when they chose the exact hue of red – "No, that's not a womb, that's a telephone box. No, that's worse, that's salmon!" The entrance is pink carpet, to evoke an 8ft vagina. (All misogynists should be sent here, as punishment. It should be the designated spa for men who hate women.)
And here are my fellow babies, lying on the waterbeds, looking not, obviously, like babies, but like affluent European professionals, being aggressively quiet. Twenty minutes, I lie there wobbling. I am not sure how relaxing it actually is. The spa design evokes, in no particular order, Egypt, the tropics and the North Pole. You wonder if, psychologically, you need air miles.
• The womb room is part of the Corallium Spa at Lopesan Costa Meloneras Resort (+34 902 450010, lopesan.com/en). Doubles from €684 room only for a four-night stay. Lopesan Costa Meloneras is part of Gran Canaria Spa, Wellness & Health (+34 928 367508, grancanariawellness.com). For flights to Gran Canaria, see flycheapo.com
