How to Plan a Spa-Hopping Trip Across Vancouver Island

I'm sitting neck deep in a hot tub, watching a float plane land. Moments earlier, I was in a cold plunge pool and soon I’ll be scooping handfuls of magnesium-infused salt from a glittering pile and scrubbing the mainland off my skin. I’m at HAVN, a floating sauna experience built on a refurbished naval barge moored in the harbor of Victoria, the biggest city on Vancouver Island in British Columbia—and the first stop on a trip around Vancouver Island that I’m referring to as a spa safari, thanks to the abundance of nature-infused wellness offerings available here.Floating sauna experience HAVN HAVN SaunasA view of the HAVN saunas from the water of Victoria on Vancouver Island Destination Greater VictoriaThe island’s allure is often centered around exhilaration—surfing on its west coast and exploring its fathomless forests—yet a calmer current of energy runs alongside this adventurous spirit. Camper van bumper stickers quip that it’s ‘Island time,’ and a slower pace of life comes with a sense of freedom here, in which your body begins to feel soft-edged and osmotic, the blue skies and blue water soothing your mind, the rainforest mists seemingly moisturising you inside and out. To me, any visit to Vancouver Island is inherently a wellness experience; and since the “tune in, drop out” Sixties, this place has been a haven for holistic hippiedom of every denomination, from astrologers and reiki practitioners to tree lovers.Today, a number of wellness services have tuned into the island's rugged and sybaritic sides. Having arrived in Victoria, with its British-influence Parliament buildings, hotel high teas, a genteel oceanfront promenade, I booked it straight to HAVN. After rinsing off the magnesium-infused salt, I stopped at its cozy onboard cafe, which invites lingering in a robe and sipping a coffee or turmeric-based wellness elixir. I disembarked feeling purified and ready to keep exploring.Inside the subterranean Kingfisher Resort Healing Caves Kingfisher Resort and SpaA few hours’ drive northeast takes you to Kingfisher Pacific Resort & Spa, perched on a long, rocky, sunrise-facing beach on Vancouver Island's east shore, near the towns of Comox and Courtney. This spa has been a wellness landmark for two decades thanks to its subterranean hydrotherapy circuit, a sequence of hot tubs, grotto waterfalls, and rain shower pools. In late 2024, it unveiled its Healing Caves, a 75-minute private journey through a succession of multi-sensory chambers, starting with a steam room scented with plumeria and threaded with a cool waterfall. I enter a glowing pink salt cave, and a cryotherapy chamber where the walls dissolve into LED footage of arctic glaciers. I then undergo full-body red-light therapy, and finally, a storm pool where I swim beneath simulated wind, rain, rolling thunder, and a screen crackling with lightning. It’s like being shipwrecked in the Pacific but considerably warmer. Only three of these immersive spas exist in the world (the others are in Macau and Milan), making this a rare and fun adventure, particularly if the weather outside is looking moody.I drove on, the trappings of urban life tapering off as I cut West between the towering cedar trees of Cathedral Grove and along the aquamarine Taylor River. Suddenly, the highway straightens and I catch glimpses of the ocean between windbeaten coastal pines as I approach Tofino. This remote outpost town, built around the turn of the 20th century by fishermen and otter trappers, lies in Clayoquot Sound, a region of richly forested mountainous islands and glacier-carved fjords, and the territory of the Nuu-chah-nulth, the collective name (translating to “all along the mountains and sea”) for the 14 First Nations who have lived among some of the largest intact coastal rainforests on Vancouver Island for five thousand years. In the 1980s the Nuu-chah-nulth won an injunction against the provincial government to protect the 2,000-year-old trees from being turned into toilet paper by the forestry industry. In the ‘90s, they led an anti-logging demonstration known as the War for the Woods, one of Canada’s largest civil protests, and they now run one of the Canada’s best-known Indigenous Guardian initiatives, stewarding the land and ocean as they have done for generations.This is a region where eagles perch in lichen-draped hemlock trees; black bears and orca pods are easily spotted, and pink sunsets streaming over innumerable secluded coves. It’s in one such cove that off-shore builder Mike Mavis constructed his charming float home Moon Jelly Bathhouse and the bath house moored beside it, which he ferried me to 15 minutes by skiff from a Tofino pier.Moon Jelly takes its name from two things: the stingless white jellyfish in this part of the Pacific Ocean, and the wobbly feeling that spreads through your body when soaking in the bath house’s wood-fired tubs. Those tubs—one freshwater, one ocean salt—are filled with three varieties of local kelp. A practice inspired by traditional Irish seaweed bathing, the kelp’s vitamins, magnesium, iodine, and potassium turn the bathwater into a kind of nutritive dashi broth, with you as the star ingredient.Guests equipped with wifi, a fire pit, showers, fleece robes, and tea are left in total seclusion to alternate between hot soaks and cannonballing into the ocean, with intermittent paddleboarding. Submerged to the neck, I rub silk-slime blades of kelp into my skin and hair while breathing salt air scented with woodsmoke. I feel something far more profound than pampering—a deep appreciation for the preciousness of this sublime natural world.On Vancouver Island, spa resorts come hand in hand with proximity to nature West Coast Aquatic SafarisThat feeling carries forth with a subsequent journey to the most rugged of all Vancouver Island’s “spas”: Hot Springs Cove in Maquinna Marine Provincial Park, a geothermal site the local Ahousaht Nation calls mux̣ʷšiƛa, “steaming from rock.” West Coast Aquatic Safaris will take you on the 90-minute boat journey northwest from Tofino that doubles as a wildlife watching excursion: we saw pods of orcas, bald eagles, barking sea lions hauled out on the rocks, and rafts of sea otters drifting on their backs. Once moored, a boardwalk leads through old-growth forest to the fault itself, where ocean water is drawn in, heated up high and released through fissures in the rock. Hot waterfalls that pound deliciously on your sore shoulders feed the stepped natural hot tubs, each one a little cooler than the last as the water merges with incoming surf.One of Clayoquot Wilderness Lodge's luxe canvas tents Clayoquot Wilderness LodgeSundown at Clayoquot Wilderness Lodge, Clayoquot Wilderness LodgeThe final, most remote destination in my journey is Clayoquot Wilderness Lodge, a secluded, off-grid glamping outpost accessible only by floatplane or boat. Here, any distinction between spa and safari collapses, and the outdoors and wellness weave together. In my stove-heated canvas tent, I sit in my warm, comfortable bed and sip a morning coffee before taking a hot, spruce-scented shower that’s open to the forest canopy. It’s just what my body needs, though early morning stretching and circulation-boosting glacial cold plunges are also options. There are excursions such as canyoning the river or hiking through Bedwell Sound’s ancient old growth forests and returning to basecamp by helicopter. Though high-adventure, they remain immersive and grounding in nature. So too is the Healing Grounds spa, which has hot tubs perched prettily on the water’s edge, plus a sauna and cold plunge circuit, and treatment rooms and tents where trained bodyworkers glimpse your soul through massages.“Do you have trouble getting out of your own head?” senior therapist, Ocean Forstner, asks me, while working a charm on my resistant fascia. “Oh,” I replied. “I see you have a gift.” Although sitting here, soaking blissfully into my surroundings on the knife edge of the continent, I think I’d already started loosening myself out of it.Tofino Resort & Marina Remote Floating Sauna, a 30-minute boat ride from the main property Tofino Resort & MarinaWhere to goAncient Cedars SpaBook the Cedar Sanctuary at Ancient Cedars Spa at Tofino’s Wickanninish Inn, a special ocean-front suite situated to take in the tranquil sound of the waves (though every service features a beach-view foot soak). The cavelike, eucalyptus-scented steam room is glorious after a day in the cold surf.Drift SpaDrift Spa, at Ucluelet’s Black Rock Oceanfront Resort, offers coastal-themed treatments using ocean mud, salt and seaweed to scrub, purify and hydrate the skin.Tofino Resort & Marina Remote Floating SaunaA 30-minute boat ride from Tofino Resort & Marina is the hotel’s wood-fired Remote Floating Sauna where you can relax in privacy, save for the odd seal, or a bear ambling along nearby shores. The windowed sauna means you won’t miss a thing outside.Salish Sea Nature ConnectionsAuthor, artist and certified forest therapy guide Kelly Hutchison leads mindful walking groups near Courtney, Comox, and Nanaimo. Join her for forest bathing or connecting with the Island’s ancient trees.Hot Tub Boat VictoriaIts location in an industrial working waterway won’t provide glorious views, but there’s something whimsical about hot tub boating on a summer’s evening, especially with a local Driftwood beer in hand.