ЮГА

Yuga stands at Gornoshchitskaya territoriya 7, in the village of Gorny Shchit some 20 kilometres from the centre of Yekaterinburg, reachable by city buses 91, 91M and 120/66. The operator counts three pools totalling 856 square metres - an outdoor one, an indoor adult one and a children's pool - plus a splash zone for water play. Water for all of them, and for the showers, washrooms and catering points as well, is drawn from the site's own artesian borehole at a depth of 160 metres, filtered before it reaches the basins and treated again inside them under a separate regime.

Temperatures are set by season rather than by a spring. The indoor pool holds 30 degrees; the outdoor pool is run at 36-37 in winter and 33-35 in summer, which makes the open-air basin the warmer of the two exactly when the Urals are coldest. It has a 14-metre contrast zone and a depth of 1.5 metres, and swimmers can reach it from inside the building or from the cafe without going out into the cold. The children's pool is 0.6 metres deep, sits next to the indoor adult pool and the splash zone, and is held steady at 30-31 degrees; armbands and vests are handed out free at the poolside, and swim nappies are compulsory below the age of four. A sun terrace of 400 square metres with loungers and a bar runs alongside.

Bathing is included in the entrance price, and so is the bath house side: six themed rooms, each with its own character. There is a wood-fired Russian banya beside the outdoor pool with a plunge tub at the exit, a marble hammam, a juniper room, a beer room, a so-called mechanical banya built around an engineered heat-and-humidity balance, and a sanarium for children with a salt-brick wall, non-slip flooring and cartoons on a screen. Free collective aufguss sessions with fans run every hour; themed show steamings cost extra, and a seventh room - a wood-fired banya for groups of up to five - is booked privately and can be used without an entrance ticket at all.

Two things set the place apart from a straightforward pool complex. The first is the surf wave, a flowboarding installation the operator describes as the only one in the region, open year-round and sold either in 15-minute test runs or as hour-long instructed sessions. The second is the Winter Garden, a quiet private zone on the second floor with loungers, a bar and a panoramic view over the halls, which carries a further pool of its own for guests who buy the upgrade. Doors open at 09:00 every day, closing at 23:00 from Sunday to Thursday and at midnight on Friday and Saturday, with a later start of 12:00 on the last Monday of each month.