Нижнекамские термы

Nizhnekamskie Termy trades as a Centre of Health and Leisure at Yunosti Street 13 in Nizhnekamsk, and is one of three sites run under the cityterms.ru banner, alongside Samara and Votkinsk. The operator gives the building as 15,000 square metres and sums the offer up in a row of round numbers: more than twenty kinds of sauna and bath, more than ten kinds of pool, 34 degrees in the water and 32 degrees in the halls. Pools sit both inside the building and out in the open air, and the whole ticket is sold by time rather than by zone - two, three or four hours, or an unlimited pass.

Six bathing basins are named individually. The large indoor pool and the children's pool, both on the ground floor, are held at 32-34 degrees; the children's pool carries slides and is open from 10:00. Outdoors sit the rest: a hydromassage tub branded Blue Lagoon at 40 degrees and 0.9 metres deep, a cold plunge tub at 14 degrees, a brine basin the operator calls the Dead Sea at 38 degrees and the same 0.9-metre depth, and a thermal pool running 34-36 degrees through the year. Salinity in the brine basin is put above 30 per cent, and bathers are told to shower afterwards. None of this is spring water: the operator states plainly that German plant filters the water with ultraviolet and chlorine and heats it, and no borehole or natural source is mentioned anywhere on the site.

The steam rooms are where the place is least interchangeable. Three are Tatar: kara muncha, the smoke-fired black bath, at 80 degrees and up to 70 per cent humidity; zanger muncha, the blue bath, built of Kelo pine and run at 90 degrees; and yakty muncha, the light bath, whose stove is loaded with dunite, jade, jasper, raspberry quartzite and quartz. Around them are a Russian steam room at 93 degrees, a jade room at 100, a beer bath at 80, a dry stone sauna at 60, a glass sauna at 80, a low thermal sauna at 35, and a Sauna of Time built over the pool at 90 degrees so bathers can drop straight into warm water. Wet heat runs to a flower hammam and a Four Elements hammam, both 45 degrees at up to 100 per cent humidity, plus a heated stone bench at 45 degrees, medicinal muds, a Vichy shower and ascending and circulation showers.

The complex opens every day, holidays included. On weekdays between 08:00 and 10:00 only part of it runs - the separate men's and women's sections with their steam rooms and flower hammam, the stone sauna, the shared hammam, the Four Elements hammam and the thermal pool - with everything open from 10:00 to 22:00; at weekends the full timetable starts at 10:00. The first Monday of every month is a cleaning day and the baths stay shut. A base ticket covers all the thermal pools including the outdoor ones, the jacuzzi, the saunas and the hammams in the common zone, while spa treatments and food are billed separately, and three nearby hotels give a discount on a promo code.