Living Longer, With Room Service

Marbella has been here before. The Buchinger family opened a fasting clinic in the town in 1973, and the Incosol, a medical spa hotel in the Río Real valley, spent that decade giving the rich and famous somewhere to repent. The Incosol closed in 2012 and has stood empty ever since. Goldman Sachs has now put €145 million behind its second act as Oakmond, a longevity resort due in the third quarter of 2029, by which time Lanserhof will have been open for more than two years just down the coast at Finca Cortesin.

What we used to call a health farm now has a scientific advisory board. Clinique La Prairie, which has been at this since 1931, has said it wants 50 locations, and hotel groups with no medical history whatsoever are installing cryotherapy chambers alongside the pool. The word longevity currently covers everything from a Siemens MRI scanner to a sauna and a sympathetic conversation, so the new openings need reading with some care.

I've sorted them by what you would actually get. A clinic has doctors on the staff, diagnostics in the building and a minimum stay that suggests it means business. A hotel with a longevity spa will give you a lovely week and a blood test if you ask nicely. I've no objection to either, provided I know which one I've booked.

Doctors on the staff

Four places are ready to examine you properly now, and the newest of them opens its doors this month.

Clinique La Prairie Phuket, Thailand

The Swiss clinic's first resort in Southeast Asia sits inside Tri Vananda, a forest and lake estate about 20 minutes from the airport. The resort has 40 private pool villas, from 120 square metres to 400, and its signature programmes run for a week: Reverse Ageing, Essence of Vitality, Master Detox, and Life Reset, the last of which starts at CHF 14,900. Between appointments, there's a 50-metre pool and Seeds, a plant-based restaurant built around anti-inflammatory eating. Professor Paul Niehans founded the original in Montreux in 1931, and nobody has accused the business of underselling itself in the 95 years since.

Tulåh Clinical Wellness, Kerala, India

This is the one I'd most like to see for myself. Faizal Kottikollon, the industrialist behind Meitra Hospital, has spent a reported $100 million on 30 acres of medicinal gardens and rewilded forest in the hills of northern Kerala, with 65 suites and Siemens CT and MRI scanners sharing a site with practitioners of Ayurveda, Tibetan medicine and traditional Chinese medicine. Radiant cooling replaces air conditioning, and there's a dome called the Sonorium, billed as the largest of its type for sound therapy. An Ayurvedic physician and a radiologist reading the same set of results is either the future of medicine or a very expensive argument, and I'd pay to listen in.

SHA Mexico, Costa Mujeres

SHA's first clinic outside Spain opened in January 2024 on the beach north of Cancún, in a building whose shape was inspired by the human genome. There is a heliport, so someone may be able to confirm this. There are 100 oceanfront rooms, 35 residences and 100 treatment rooms, or one for every oceanfront bedroom, which gives you a fair idea of how the days will go. Programmes last from four to 21 days and follow the same format as the Alicante flagship.

ZEM Wellness Clinic, Altea, Spain

ZEM opened in January 2025 at the foot of the Sierra de Bernia, on a 40,000-square-metre estate looking over Altea Bay. It has 95 rooms and suites, 25 medical specialities, 32 consulting practices and its own organic farm supplying the kitchen. Its most headline-friendly programme is designed to see guests through to their 120th birthday, which seems ambitious, though the old town up the road is a pleasant place to start trying.

Hotels that have been reading up

The second group would mostly prefer you to have a nice time, and I can't say I object. Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast has acquired two American brands in the space of four months, both adults-only and both leaving the United States for the first time.

Miraval The Red Sea, Shura Island, Saudi Arabia

Miraval opened on 15 May with 180 rooms, suites and villas among the lagoons and mangroves, designed by Foster + Partners with interiors by Rockwell Group. It's all-inclusive, and the spa, at 3,000 square metres with 39 treatment rooms and a run of hammams, is the largest on the island. The Arizona original has always dealt in mindfulness and has never pretended to run a laboratory, which I find rather restful in the current climate.

Equinox Resort Amaala, Saudi Arabia

Equinox followed in September at the marina in Triple Bay, with 128 rooms, 21 residences, a spa of 1,602 square metres and four outdoor pools, one of them a magnesium salt pool on the roof. Anyone who has walked into an Equinox gym in New York and felt quietly assessed will know what to expect, this time with a view of the Hijaz mountains.

Canyon Ranch Austin, Texas

Canyon Ranch has been in business since 1979, so its longevity isn't news. Its newest property opened on 15 October across more than 600 acres of Hill Country above Lake Travis, about 55 minutes from downtown Austin, with 141 rooms by the Texan architects Lake Flato and a spa of 37 treatment rooms that the company says is the largest in the state. If the week goes well, the ranch will have 134 homesites, with houses starting at $3.8 million.

The Lake Como Edition, Italy

The palazzo in Cadenabbia dates from 1830 and looks straight across the water to Bellagio. Neri&Hu have given it 148 rooms in cream, blue and gold, there's a pool floating on the lake itself, and Mauro Colagreco has opened Cetino, his first restaurant in Italy. The Longevity Spa, run by The Longevity Suite Group, offers diagnostics and what it calls biohacking alongside a thermal pool, Turkish bath and herbal sauna. It has seven treatment rooms. I would go for the swimming and the dinner, and book a session if the weather turned.

Cori Hornbæk, Denmark

Ole Falkentorp designed this white functionalist hotel on the beach at Hornbæk in 1935. It then spent many years as a hospital and rehabilitation centre, which makes its new life as a longevity hotel rather neat. It reopened on 25 September as the first coastal hotel in Scandinavia to join The Leading Hotels of the World, with interiors by Afroditi Krassa and a restaurant run by Brian Mark Hansen, who spent 16 years at Søllerød Kro. The spa, due this month, is built on Nordic heat and cold. P.S. Krøyer painted here in the 1870s for the light, and rooms start at around DKK 4,700.

Eha, Hiiumaa Island, Estonia

Hiiumaa is two-thirds forest and a UNESCO biosphere reserve, and Eha, whose name means dusk in Estonian, keeps to eight suites and three forest cabins for no more than 22 guests. Programmes last three, five or seven nights and follow the island's calendar of five seasons, the extra one being a spell of thaw in late March that they call springrise. Peeter Pihel, who holds a Green Michelin Star, oversees the food, much of it foraged on the island or grown in the kitchen garden. Longevity is a generous word for what goes on here, but I'd take a week of Baltic silence over a cryotherapy chamber and not think twice.

RockRose, Melides, Portugal

The smallest address on the list is a single house above Melides on ten private hectares, with five suites and sea on the horizon. Manuel Aires Mateus took six years to build it in rammed earth and lioz limestone for owners who wanted something monastic, and at its centre are a fire room for sitting and a spa modelled on Roman baths. At present you can have a massage and some infrared light. A partnership with a Lisbon longevity clinic should bring ozone therapy and vitamin infusions in due course, though I suspect the walls will be doing most of the work.

Opening in 2027

Next year is mostly about the clinics, and Marbella is first out of the gate. Dates in this business should be treated as statements of hope, and I've noted where they have already moved.

Lanserhof Marbella, Spain

Due in the first quarter, this is the first Lanserhof on the Mediterranean, built for €93 million in the grounds of Finca Cortesin between Marbella and Gibraltar. Christoph Ingenhoven, who did Tegernsee and Sylt, is consulting architect. Of the 71 rooms and suites, most are doubles of around 55 square metres. The numbers I keep returning to are 2,900 square metres of medical space against 1,840 for spa and exercise, since a hotel group dabbling in medicine would have built those the other way round. The golf course next door will be useful for anyone told to walk more.

Fivelements Samui, Thailand

GOCO Hospitality bought the Bali retreat and is using this as the flagship, due early in the year at Lamai. It's a conversion of a beachfront hotel on two hectares of forest, and the new owners have sensibly kept the Chinese antiques and feng shui of the man who built it. Thermal and rainforest bathing are being added, along with a 900-square-metre longevity centre run by OLiv Longevity of Bangkok, where four doctors will handle diagnostics. Recruitment notices mention 77 rooms and six programmes of between three and 14 nights.

SHA Emirates, AlJurf, United Arab Emirates

The first announcements of SHA's third clinic spoke of 2024, and it's now promised for 2027. It takes up a 12.5-hectare private island between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, reachable only by residents and guests, with 110 treatment rooms and 120 suites. There are also 137 villas, apartments and penthouses for those who'd like to make the arrangement permanent.

Clinique La Prairie Amaala, Saudi Arabia

John Heah has drawn a cluster of white buildings with trapezoidal roofs around a central Longevity Plaza at Triple Bay, with 52 rooms and suites and 13 villas. The brochure runs to radiology, neuroscience, dentistry, a cryochamber and hyperbaric suites, so you could conceivably have your teeth seen to on the way to the beach. It was at one point meant for 2024. Industry lists now say 2027, while at least one regional guide still has the date as to be announced.

Five more for the diary

Longevity is a looser idea at some of these than at others.

The Maybourne Saint-Germain in Paris will have 101 rooms, 23 residences, a 30-metre rooftop pool and an outpost of Surrenne, the group's members' club, which already operates at The Emory in London and has a scientific board that has included David Sinclair and Andrew Huberman. Of everything here, it's the one you could fit in between lunch and the Musée d'Orsay.

**Six Senses **Loire Valley was first promised for May 2022 and is now scheduled for the third quarter. It has 50 rooms around a château on the 1,400-acre Les Bordes estate in the Sologne, 90 minutes south of Paris, and its spa of about 1,700 square metres is to include cryotherapy, red-light therapy and intermittent hypoxia.

**Shanti-Som Algarve **is the sister of a long-standing Marbella retreat and the one on this page that most people can afford. It has 22 rooms in a 19th-century farmhouse surrounded by orange and almond orchards in Moncarapacho, 20 minutes from Faro, and its yoga retreat costs €200 per person per night, excluding accommodation. The website says March.

Mailena in Loreto, on Mexico's Baja Peninsula, has moved from summer 2026 to February 2027. Its 96 rooms are adults-only, and its Wellness and Longevity Centre offers medically led assessments, sensory deprivation tanks, and a snow room, all within reach of the Loreto Bay Marine Park.

Closer to home, Long Lane in West Sussex is turning Dunford House, a Grade II-listed property near Midhurst, into an alcohol-free hotel and members' club with 20 bedrooms and ten cabins on 55 acres of the South Downs. It has been billed as "Soho House minus the hangover". There will be hyperbaric oxygen and cryotherapy, and the minibars are to be stocked with collagen shots and IV drips. It has already slipped from a 2026 opening and now appears on lists for next year.

Further off: 2029

Three large projects are promised for 2029, two of them on the Iberian coast and one in the hills behind Nice.

Buchinger Wilhelmi, Côte d'Azur, France

The family that has been supervising fasts at Lake Constance since 1953 will open its third clinic at Roquefort-les-Pins, 20 minutes from Nice airport, at the start of 2029. There will be 95 rooms and four villas on a 44-hectare estate with no cars, eight doctors, four pools, a concert hall and an art park, with interiors by Matteo Thun, who has already redone the fasting salon at Überlingen. It will also have a biodynamic farm of 1,500 square metres to supply the kitchens, which at a fasting clinic strikes me as showing a sense of humour. Stays typically run from ten to 21 nights.

Oakmond, Marbella, Spain

This is the old Incosol, and construction was due to start this autumn on a 36-month programme. The plans keep the 11-storey structure of the original main building and add a clinic of 10,000 square metres, with 140 hotel rooms and 28 private residences around it. The budget is €260 million. Marbella will by then have Buchinger, Lanserhof and Oakmond within an hour of one another, and the Costa del Sol may finally be forgiven for the 1980s.

BodyHoliday Algarve, Portugal

The St Lucia resort that has been combining treatments with a beach holiday for decades is coming to Europe, on 26 acres beside the Ria Formosa near Manta Rota, three minutes' walk through the dunes from Praia da Lota and 45 minutes from Faro. Plans show 175 rooms, five restaurants and a treatment centre of about 3,700 square metres with more than 40 treatment rooms. There's also a FIFA-standard football pitch, for which I can offer no explanation.

Before you pay the deposit

Most of these places will do you some good, if only because they'll take away the wine and send you to bed at ten. The clinics are selling something more ambitious, and before handing over CHF 14,900 I'd want to know who reads my results, what happens to them once I've gone home, and how much of it my own GP would think worth doing. A reputable clinic will answer all three without looking hurt.

The Buchinger family have been telling people to eat less for over a century. Nobody has improved on the advice yet, though a good many people are now charging for the attempt.