The Retreat at Blue Lagoon - Blue Lagoon

Every hotel featured is visited personally by members of our team, given the Smith seal of approval, and then anonymously reviewed. As soon as our reviewers have returned from this hotel in Grindavík and unpacked their Blue Lagoon Iceland skin creams, a full account of their spa break will be with you. In the meantime, to whet your wanderlust, here's a quick peek inside the Retreat at Blue Lagoon in Iceland…

When the everyday begins to take its toll, you sometimes need a place that takes the phrase ‘out of this world’ to its near-literal limit. Thankfully, such a place exists, and it’s called The Retreat at Blue Lagoon. Nestled in a stark landscape of centuries-old lava, long since hardened into jagged, moss covered fields, the hotel is carved into a landscape that looks a little like what we imagine the moon looks like up close. Then you see the water: bright blue, almost milky, and balmy enough to produce clouds of steam that roll over the surface, shrouding everything in mist. Every one of the 62 suites looks out over this extraordinary landscape, and the calming effect it has is such that the hotel could have skipped on their spa entirely, and people would still come here with the sole intention of relaxing. But they didn’t. Instead, the hotel went not quite out of this world, but under it, building a state-of-the-art spa inside the lava field. By the time you’ve been to the cavernous steam room or sampled an in-water massage, there’s one thing you can be certain of – you’ll feel a very long way from everyday.