Mud bath

A mud bath is a bath of mud, commonly from areas where hot spring water can combine with volcanic ash. While mud baths have a long traditional heritage that can be traced over thousands of years, they can be found in high-end spas in many countries of the world.

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Mud bath in Turkey

Bather covered with mud at the Dead Sea

Mud baths come from many sources:[1]

• Lakes (e.g. Lake Techirghiol in Romania and Käina Bay in Estonia)
• Saltwater sea (e.g. Dead Sea in Jordan[2] and Israel)
• Hot springs (e.g. Calistoga, Napa Valley, California)
• Mud volcano (e.g. Tiga Island, Malaysia,[3] El Totumo, Colombia[4])

Mud baths in the United States are mostly found at the resorts in California and Miami Beach, Florida. The mud consists of a combination of local volcanic ash, imported Canadian peat, and naturally heated mineral waters.

Historically, the mud bath treatment has been used for centuries, in Eastern and Western European spas, as a way to relieve arthritis.

In Romania, Lake Techirghiol is famous for treatments through mud baths. The lake's hypersaline environment is due to the successive evaporation of sea water that remained in its basin, after a tectono-erosive phase exhaustion, created a fluvial-marine firth and the lake's connection to the sea closed. The accumulation of salts in the water are also a result of a semiarid climate with higher temperatures in summer, leading to pronounced evaporation. The lake's higher salinity (83.6 g/l in 1970, and 63.6 gl/l in 1980), in spite of a decrease over time, has been a bottleneck in the selection of the lake animal and plant species.[5]

In Italy, in Lido delle Nazioni at Ferrara offers mud bath therapies. It is claimed that the treatment, which is founded on contact with bromine salt water, has anti-inflammatory, detoxifying, analgesic, relaxing and revitalizing properties.[6]