Thermes Borda

The Thermes Borda occupy a green domain on the shaded banks of the Adour at Dax, a few minutes from the town centre. Éliane Pressigout founded them in May 1980, taking her design cues from Abano near Padua: patios, glass roofs, Gallo-Roman columns and statues, plants everywhere, and — unusually for the period — windows in the mud-treatment cabins. The business has stayed in the family, with her son Jean-Charles Pressigout as managing director while she remains president. The establishment grew into a self-contained domain: three integrated accommodation parks reached through covered galleries, two restaurants, a grocery, a hairdresser and an osteopathy practice, with a free morning shuttle for guests staying elsewhere.

Medically the establishment works on rheumatology, phlebology and fibromyalgia over the standard eighteen-day French cure, with six-day mini-cures for shorter stays. Its raw materials are the two that made Dax a spa town: hot mineral water and péloïde, the local mud. The mud forms where thermal water rises into the silt of the Adour and a blue micro-alga develops in it; the alga is now grown under glass and the péloïde produced at the TerDax laboratory, then delivered to the town's establishments by a municipal mud authority. Dax water emerges hot enough to need cooling before treatment, and the surplus heat is recovered to warm the building and its domestic hot water. The house holds AQUACERT certification for the sanitary quality of the water filling its pools.

The thermal spa, which the operator says was the first on the Dax station, is open to cure guests and outside visitors alike. It offers two pools — an indoor one lit through a large glass roof, and an outdoor one for bathing in the sun — equipped with jacuzzis, waterfalls, swan-neck jets, geysers, bubbling benches and massage jets. Children from the age of nine are admitted with an adult. Outside the free bathing slots the pools are given over to booked aquatic sessions: aquabike, aquagym, swimming lessons and baby swimming. Certified coaches also run aquagym, Nordic walking and pilates, and a beauty and well-being team handles individual relaxation treatments.