Thermes de Saubusse

Saubusse-les-Bains lies on the banks of the Adour about fifteen minutes from Dax and twenty from the Landes beaches, which makes it the Landes thermal station nearest the Atlantic. The establishment has belonged to the Laborde family since 1922, when the baths were knocked down to Bernard Laborde at a court auction in Dax; his successors Robert, Arnaud and now Arthur Laborde have run it since, and the firm marked its centenary in 2022. Bathing here is much older than the company. A 1706 survey records the isolated bains de Jouanin near a mill, an eighteenth-century royal inspector found bathers sharing a plank cabin with no shelter from the rain, and an 1809 account describes a pit barely a metre deep filled with peat slaked in thermal water, measured at 27 degrees, into which the sick sank up to their shoulders. A hotter spring at 38 degrees was found in April 1866, after which the commune leased the baths out and built a heating house and a farmhouse beside them.

The water now used comes from the Raja spring and rises naturally at 39 degrees. It is a sodium-chloride water, and the house makes its own peloid from it: pelose, a mix of peat and thermal water blended on site and renewed daily, used mainly in the rheumatology treatments. The spa is accredited by the French health insurance system for rheumatology and phlebology, with additional programmes aimed at fibromyalgia, algodystrophy and recovery after cancer treatment. A reimbursed course is eighteen days of treatment given six days a week; a shorter unreimbursed six-day mini-cure of thirty treatments is sold alongside it, rheumatology treatments given at 36 degrees and the phlebology circuit - carbo-gaseous bath, counter-current walking corridor, aerated bath, hydromassage - at 28.

Treatment is given in running-water baths, underwater-jet and immersion-shower baths, aerated baths, high-pressure showers, local mud applications, steam boxes and physiotherapist-led kinebalneotherapy in a thermal pool, with a walking corridor for venous work. The site is also a small resort: a three-star Logis hotel with studios and apartments, an outdoor pool heated to 30 degrees added in 2003, a wellness wing with hammam, aquabiking, hydrojet and a float bed, and the Lou Touping restaurant. Around sixty staff work the season and the spa treats close to three thousand patients a year.