The huge rise in popularity of saunas in Wales and why they're so good for you
Saunas are having somewhat of a renaissance here in Wales and the UK as more and more of us discover the steamy stress-busting properties they can offer alongside a multitude of other health benefits. There are now 104 public saunas in Britain which follow the Finnish style with wooden walls, hot stones, and cold plunge pools. And more of them are popping up along the Welsh coastline – tucked away in the sand dunes or perched in car parks with smoke spiralling from the chimneys and signalled by a gathering of folk clad in dryrobes with glowing faces and tingling skin.
Is it just another fad, a bit like the latest craze of cold water dipping, or is there something in the healing properties saunas are said to offer? From alleviating muscle soreness to improving blood circulation and calming the nervous system saunas are proven to help make us feel at peace and happier offering a way to reduce blood pressure and manage chronic conditions. From a business point of view some have seen a gap in the market. Often inspired by travels abroad – particularly to Scandinavia – or their own experiences sauna owners are keen to share the love.
In 2023 there were 45 such saunas in the UK. In the last year alone that number has more than doubled, according to the British Sauna Society (BSS). There are currently 16 registered with the BSS in Wales with the Gower and Pembrokeshire being particular hotspots, so to speak.
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Further Finnish-style saunas are expected to open with the number predicted to double to more than 200 in 2025. It’s still a long way off Finland where there are an estimated 3.3m saunas for a population of 5.6m. In fact the sauna culture is so valued in Finland that in 2020 it was inscribed on the Unesco list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.
Here in Wales we have some catching up to do – saunas perhaps have a reputation as an expensive activity for the few whereas in Finland they have a far more everyday role. Many people have saunas in their homes – lots of older Finnish people were even born in saunas. But they are also considered a sacred space and a place to find community as well as peace. Finland has topped the world happiness report rankings for the past six years – could its sauna culture have anything to do with it?
Under a darkening sky in Pembrokeshire, with the night bleeding into the winter daylight, the flickering orange glow from the Wildwater Sauna feels especially welcoming. This mobile sauna moves around the Pembrokeshire coastline with the seasons with regular spots at Pwllgwaelod, Nolton Haven, Little Haven, Newgale, and Whitesands.
Throughout autumn the sauna pitched up at Hilton Court nestled in 18 acres of open fields, woodlands, gardens, and ponds. The sea was replaced by two “chill tubs” so the hot/cold contrast could still be enjoyed. It’s here where I meet Scott Chalmers who set up Wildwater Sauna with his friend, colleague, and business partner Richard Lynch. He’s keen for me to experience the sauna and tells me to bring along a swimsuit and a towel. When I arrive six people are emerging from the beautifully-built wooden sauna and getting dressed around a crackling fire. A copper kettle sings merrily above the flames. Scott opens the door to the sauna which is painted matt black with a large picture window facing out to the gardens.
“The moment the sauna door swings open we are stepping into a blissful state of calm,” he explains. “The gentle sound of the fire crackling combined with the waves lapping the shore outside the door creates a symphony of primal relaxation.”
Scott’s rugged features split into a ready smile as he sits back on the smooth wooden bench and succumbs to the heat with only the gentle ticking sound from the stones on the burner interrupting the silence. He needs this, he tells me, as it’s been a whirlwind few weeks of work.
As a filmmaker and documentary maker Scott has travelled all over the world, often working side by side with Richard. “It has gifted me some incredible life experiences,” he explains. “From trekking through the dense Sri Lankan jungle on a 500cc scrambler to spending an afternoon in Paris with Mike Tyson and everything in between. It’s a wild, addictive, and often stressful ride that the mind and body can get completely caught up in.”
But it was the call of home that brought him back to Pembrokeshire. “While we were staying in hotels all over the world we’d often go for a sauna,” Scott says. “It was while filming in Estonia that we experienced the sauna culture there and we were completely captivated by it. I thought: ‘How do we bring that to our coastline?’ Over there saunas are integrated into their lives like cafes and pubs are here. I wanted to recreate that but with a Celtic twist. And then one day I said to Richard: ‘We should build a sauna’.”
And so in a matter of weeks the pair had bought a sauna from Denmark and took their first customers the day after it arrived in June 2023. “As soon as people started sharing their experiences it took off,” Scott adds.
Located on beaches in Pembrokeshire Scott said the sauna has developed its “own character”. The sea certainly helps. “People come to the sauna and say they’re not going into the sea but they soon change their minds,” Scott laughs. “They come away feeling thrilled and liberated.”
It’s a stark contrast from the “stuffy” experience of hotel and spa saunas which are electric and often without windows and have a “clinical” feel. Wood undoubtedly gives a different heat, says Scott. “It’s like lots of little cwtches,” he says.
It’s interesting to learn later that at the heart of Finnish sauna culture is löyly (pronounced low-lu) – a word that literally translates as ‘steam’ or ‘heat’. But that doesn’t come close to capturing it with some comparing the experience of good löyly to an intense hug. Much like a cwtch, it’s a spiritual thing. Such is the intensity of the sauna’s “hug” it becomes almost overwhelming and after a spell of gentle sweating we have to go outside.
This is the best part Scott promises me as we stand in the half-darkness, a fine drizzle dampening our skin. He leads me to the chill tubs – set at a nippy nine degrees – and guides me through the process of submerging my body. It’s not an entirely appealing prospect but as I lower my body gingerly into the water and brace myself against the stabbing cold something amazing happens. Skin tingling, chest and temples gently pulsating, I feel entirely in the moment. It’s different to sea dipping, which I regularly do all year round. Whereas the ocean is vast and constantly moving in a way that forces you to look outwards the tubs require me to go inwards, to find that peace within that allows me to ignore the reflex response to jump out. After a minute a great sense of calm sweeps over me. I look up at the steely grey sky with pink tinges on the edges of the clouds. It’s not a comfortable feeling but it’s certainly not uncomfortable either. After five minutes we hot foot it back into the sauna, the welcome warmth enveloping our bodies. I feel euphoric, alive, tingly.
Scott can barely talk coherently as he tries to explain the health benefits. They are varied: saunas reduce cortisol levels while the heat activates the parasympathetic nerve. They’re great for post-workout recovery and they can help manage pain. But it’s not just the physical effects. “People who come here are generally searching for peace and solace,” says Scott. “We live in a noisy world. It’s a chance to unplug.”
There’s no hope of taking a phone or laptop into the humid environment. Scott adds: “In today’s fast-paced world we often find ourselves detached from the soothing rhythm of our natural environment. We’re bombarded with a constant influx of information and distraction; with technology, social media, and work responsibilities we have to really go out of our way to find a moment of presence in everyday life.”
The sauna is “medicine for the chaos” he said. The only thing to do is absorb the heat and savour the view. “We all need to ground ourselves and recalibrate once in a while,” Scott continues. “Stepping into the heat of the sauna is the perfect antidote for a rapid lifestyle and a fantastic tool in practising the art of being present in the moment.”
It’s easy to pass the sauna craze off as a bit of a fad but cultures around the world have been using them for millennia. Here in the UK we are only now catching up to this miraculous ancient practice. Not only do our circulation, heart, lungs, and skin respond positively but our immune system, metabolism, and mental health do too.
“You want to hold and guide people through the experience,” Scott explains. “People don’t know their limits – we don’t spend enough time being present. I’m still travelling for work but now I’m coming back to this. It completely recalibrates me.”
The sauna is a labour of love and Scott wants everyone to be able to access it. It’s relatively cheap when you compare it to gym sessions or even an hour-long massage – the sauna costs £15 for one 60-minute session. “It’s about community and bringing people together,” he explains. “Especially during the winter months in Pembrokeshire which can be harsh and dark. A lot of people come here knowing they need it to make them feel better.”
As well as the regulars and visitors Wildwater Sauna is partnering up with the local crossfit gym and mental health charities including Get The Boys A Lift (GTBAL) and Men2Men. It’s encouraging to see both men and women enjoying the sauna as there is undoubtedly a bias towards women with Wildwater’s Instagram followers split 75/25 in favour of females, Scott says. My own experience tells me it’s the same when it comes to cold-water dipping although gym saunas tend to be overwhelmingly male, says Scott, drawing on his own experience.
Several weeks later, on the south side of the county, it’s 7am on a Monday and Bryony Rees is getting her sauna fired up. The Saundersfoot-based Sea and Steam sauna is run by Bryony and her friend Kerry Evans. The pair met at a wellbeing event in Carmarthenshire a couple of years ago. Bryony had not long returned to her hometown and reconnected with the joys of cold-water swimming. Inspired by their shared experience and the rising popularity of saunas the two friends went for it. Bryony says: “I’d heard about saunas in other countries and I knew they were good for you but I hadn’t realised there were so many health benefits linked to the cardiovascular system, the nervous system, and Alzheimer’s, which my nan had.”
While her full-time job is working with schools and encouraging children to spend time in the outdoors she runs Sea and Steam either side of the day job helping adults “connect with the outdoors and support their health and wellbeing through the sauna”. Sitting on the slipway down to Saundersfoot beach the sauna has proved a popular attraction during the first summer of opening.
Now it’s December and the sun doesn’t rise until after 8am. It’s part of the magic, Bryony says. “It’s the sound of the fire, the tranquil and peaceful view,” she explains. “Inside here it seems like a very different world. You get to experience that connection with nature and the scenery.”
The huge glass window looks straight over the sea with the Gower peninsula sticking out on the horizon. “It definitely has something to do with the picture window,” Bryony adds. “It frames the view and it feels like your own private space.”
The mornings are particularly special. “It’s those very first few minutes of the day – you get to wake up with nature,” she says.
After reading The Little Book of Hygge by the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen and a book called Wintering which examined the power of rest and retreat at difficult times Bryony is convinced the benefits of saunas are varied. “In both books it talks about the Scandinavians being the happiest nations in the world,” she says. “In these countries they embrace the winter and cold weather. One way they do this is through saunaing regularly to help them through the dark and cold times.”
Through Sea and Steam Bryony and Kerry want to help people connect with the Pembrokeshire coast all year round by making their sauna affordable and accessible in a way for people to “build it into their lifestyle to support their physical and mental health”.
It’s only during the initial stages of lighting that the sauna emits any smoke. The wood comes from less than a mile up the road at Hopshill Farm while the waste ash will soon be used to fertilise the sensory garden in the middle of Saundersfoot village. The burner itself is incredibly efficient – producing just a compact lunchbox-sized amount of ash daily. The fire is special, giving off a cosiness that only a wood fire can. “People definitely embrace and enjoy the heat,” Bryony adds.
While it’s not compulsory to combine the heat of the sauna with the cold of the sea there’s something particularly energising about the contrast between hot and cold. “It’s more than a fad,” Bryony says. “You really do experience ‘blue therapy’ (spending time in nature near blue spaces such as lakes, rivers, or the ocean) by looking out the picture window to the sea, watching the birds effortlessly glide around whilst the tide is coming in and out.”
In its simplest guise the sauna is about absorbing the heat and the surroundings. “There are no distractions,” Bryony continues. “It gives you clarity of mind, a chance to switch off and disconnect. You feel like you’re immersed in nature and the environment.” Its rawness and simplicity is a great contrast to the complexities of modern life.
Saundersfoot is synonymous with the sea – every New Year it holds the biggest festive dip in the UK. Starting off with just 10 people in 1984 with Martin Williams at the helm it now attracts 10,000 people to the village on New Year’s Day and has raised more than £800,000 for charity. This year the Sea and Steam sauna will be open for 10-minute slots to help swimmers warm up afterwards. Today, however, it’ll be the Numb Nuts who enjoy the sauna. A group of mostly male swimmers the Numb Nuts came about as a tongue-in-cheek male version of the Bluetits. The name seems to have stuck and they even have hoodies with their own logo on. After their morning dips, held religiously every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, a few of them jump into the sauna.
Phil Thomas, a regular, started dipping in the sea five years ago in support of a friend who’d developed cancer and was determined to fight the disease in every way she knew. “Quite a few of us joined her to support her,” Phil explains. One of those was Jim, 74, who managed to clock up an impressive 800 days dipping without missing a single day.
“Four of us went quite regularly then, one by one, people started joining us,” Phil continues. “For a while there were six of us and our ages added up to 344 so we were called the 344 club. But we had to keep changing the name as people had birthdays. There’s 24 of us now.”
It’s not fancy and it’s not complicated. The group, which today is around 15-strong, congregate around two wooden picnic tables and get changed out of plastic buckets and bags for life. The air is filled with laughter and the occasional guffaw.
“Everyone leaves feeling a bit better,” Phil continues. “You will hear us laughing all the way down to the water’s edge. It’s the camaraderie, which is essentially the same as mental health anyway. We’re mostly all retired and have worked in big organisations and you lose that camaraderie.”
It’s where important conversations happen, as the cold water strips the men of everything apart from what it is to be human. “Walking up from the sea today we were talking about prostate cancer,” says Phil.
They are all excited about swimming next week, which Phil informs me is “golden week”. “That’s when it’s high tide in the morning,” he says.
Bryony is keen to promote the wellbeing message of the sauna and stresses that people don’t have to go into the sea and nor do they have to wear swimsuits if they’d rather cover up. There are exciting conversations happening too to get the sauna used for social prescribing, which means that GPs can refer patients to help them manage certain conditions.
Dr Sarah Tamplin, a GP in Saundersfoot, is a keen sauna user herself and an enthusiastic advocate of social prescribing. Although moving to Tenby to work in the New Year she has been instrumental in promoting how lifestyle medicine can help patients. Sitting on the working group set up by the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine (BSLM) Dr Tamplin helped develop the BSLM Lifestyle Medicine Core Accreditation which means GPs can extend their roles to include lifestyle medicine. Running since April 2024 it’s a movement that’s certainly growing in Wales, she says.
“There is a large active lifestyle medicine movement in Wales and we have had two lifestyle medicine retreats over the last 18 months which were well-attended by healthcare professionals across Wales,” Dr Tamplin explains. “There were a wide range of talks as well as yoga, sea dips, coastal path walks, and journaling workshops.”
Lifestyle medicine effectively means supporting people with the “six pillars of life” which are mental wellbeing, healthy relationships, physical activity, healthy eating, sleep, and avoidance of harmful substances. Starting in January 2025 Hwyel Dda health board is running a lifestyle medicine programme in Pembrokeshire. Spaces on the programme were filled up in less than two weeks and include gym membership, in-person group health coaching, education, workshops, and a health-focused consultation review and follow-up with a GP or a nurse specialising in lifestyle medicine. Dr Tamplin is working on creating a business case to upscale the programme and offer it to more patients and hopes that saunas can be included in the offering. She already refers patients to a coasteering organisation.
Evidence is growing around the positive impacts of lifestyle medicine: one report by the National Academy of Social Prescribing showed a 42% reduction in GP appointments among 1,751 patients who accessed social prescribing. In Finland one large-scale study following 2,315 middle-aged men found those taking a sauna more than four times a week were two-thirds less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease or dementia over a 20-year period.
Like Scott Dr Tamplin points to the work of Dr Søberg who is arguably one of the leading researchers on the topic. Dr Søberg studied her PhD at the University of Copenhagen looking at metabolism and the role of brown fat. Her research on the physiology of deliberate cold and heat exposure is helping to back up what many cultures have known instinctively for thousands of years – changing our temperature is good for us. From increased metabolism, immunity, and lowered insulin resistance to the potential to reduce excess weight and ease muscle and joint pain the physical benefits are varied. She also advocates the incredible mental health benefits from engaging with the cold and the way it releases mood-boosting hormones and exposes us to a form of ‘healthy stress’, building our resilience to modern life. In 2021 she published research setting out the minimum amount of time that we need to spend in the cold to receive all these incredible health benefits. It’s since been dubbed the Søberg Principle which has led to the now-widely-adopted guidelines of 11 minutes of cold and 57 minutes of heat per week.
It’s clear that saunas are not only skin-tingling – they help people explore what it is to be human. Whether it’s physical, mental, or social the benefits are having a profound effect on people all over. One of Søberg’s principles is to finish on the cold to increase metabolism and prolong the benefits of happy chemicals in the brain. However I prefer to finish with the comforting soothing heat of the sauna, carried along in the cocoon of warmth long after I leave.
I give the final words to Scott, who says: “There is something truly magical about the combination of heat from a sauna and the energy of the cold Atlantic sea. The combination of the sauna and sea creates this holistic sense of wellbeing, connecting us back to the tranquility of Mother Nature and grounding ourselves in the present moment.” It truly is a way to find moments of peace and presence amid the chaos of life.