"What kind of tree are you?": The Italian mountain hotel offering the world's most unique spa treatment
Bark-infused cocktails, forest cuisine and stone pine massages are all part of the mountain magic at Forestis in South Tyrol
What kind of tree are you? Joking aside, it’s a serious question. I’m a stone pine, or zirbelkiefer, according to spa manager Alessandra Tiengo, and I’ve been mulling over the answer ever since she started prodding my upper back with a spindle-shaped wooden stick.
The masseuse is in the midst of delivering a personalised tree therapy ceremony based on one of four healing woods – the others being mountain pine, spruce and larch – and I think I’m actually enjoying the experience. In part because of her sing-song Italian purr, but also in view of the fact that she is dousing me in stone pine oil from the surrounding forest and the potent scent is strong enough to settle me into a fever dream that I don’t want to shake. It carries me out into the snow-filled air where I imagine myself standing, as I am now, butt-naked, besieged by branches, cones and a considerable amount of spiky needles. That’s the desired effect, anyway.
I’m more than 1,800m up in the Italian Dolomites, on the Plose massif near the South Tyrolean town of Brixen, with a view of the Villnöss Valley that’s practically a clinic in the art of mountain drama in its own right. The eagle’s-nest spa is tucked away inside Forestis, a game-changing new carbon-neutral, plastic-free hotel that was once a princely retreat for frazzled friars and pooped-out Popes seeking respite from the Vatican. Up here, this close to God, they were refreshingly far from any dark thought.
That the chateau was used as an Alpine sanctuary for holy men isn’t that far from the enlightening, post-lockdown vibe the place seeks to channel today. The mood feels spiritual, the service papal-worthy, the minibar loaded with organic fruit juices perfect for God-fearing teetotallers. There’s a torment of divine cocktails and wines in the restaurant and firelit bar, of course, but the point is this is a place to come to rejuvenate, regenerate and revive. Not proselytise. You’ll realise suddenly, delightfully, that you are at church. Just one of a completely different sort.
The tree therapy is the aperitivo. Over two days, my detox comprises of a spruce body scrub and a whack-a-mole-like session in which tuned wooden forks are boinged off the body’s acupuncture meridian points so sound frequencies can retune your bones and zigzag their way up your spine. All is to help amplify and energise your own potential.
Then, I sign-up for a lungful of wyda, a Celtic yoga that melds forest bathing, tree hugging and qigong, and I take the Pfannspitz gondola up into brightening skies to savour the rolling swell of snowy summits in Puez-Geisler Nature Park. The hotel eases you into its holistic new story, offering the charged air, mountain space and haunting landscape to do simply nothing but breathe and take it all in.
If Forestis seeks to retread the well-worn territory of the Alpine wellness hideaway, that’s because of dream-chasing, first-time hoteliers Teresa Unterthiner and Stefan Hinteregger. They’ve spent years studying the world’s most memorable spa hotels, particularly the Hoshinoya resorts in Japan, but their connection with this historic bolt-hole needs a little unpacking.
A decade before the Vatican’s pontiffs arrived in the 1920s, the timber-clad Alpine retreat was devised as a swanky tuberculosis sanatorium for the Austrian monarchy. But then the First World War arrived, the map of Europe was redrawn and the German-speaking territory of South Tyrol was annexed by Italy in 1919. Under the circumstances, the sanatorium was never used and the property was gifted by Emperor Charles I of Austria to Rome. The next period, if a little hazy, saw the Catholic church sell the building to the Italian government in the 1950s, before it fell into a long period of disrepair, reopening as the four-star Hotel Rosalpina in the late 2000s. By a stroke of fate, it was managed by Hinteregger’s father. Now, the new co-owners have pulled the hotel firmly back to where it belongs – the realm of elevated, spiritual experience.
“This is the project of a lifetime and it’s taken us a decade to get to this point,” Unterthiner tells me. “It’s more than a reimagining. It’s a complete rebirth and every detail is designed to spark your imagination. Clearly, we have the landscape at the heart of the hotel’s identity. So there are no pictures or paintings, only the views outside. The value here is nature.”
To profit from this enviable landscape, three architecturally stunning hexagonal prism towers branch off from the time-warped villa to ratchet up the already impressive spectacle. They soar above the treetops, leading to a fitness studio, gym and rooftop bar, and ensure every one of the pulse-quickening balcony suites has the same view. Inside, there is a radical softening with bright windows, blonde woods and deep-tub bathrooms made with Dolomite stone and beeswax. Outside, the mountains bare their teeth, all cracked molars of rock and incisors jabbing skywards.
Tonight, I’m dining solo in a booth in the hotel’s operatic restaurant, designed with the rake of a theatre and a podium view of the heartstring-tugging peaks. Stagecraft is writ large on the menu, with imaginative “forest cuisine” taking the hotel’s raw diet and well-being ethos to a whole new spirit-raising level. You’d need a dictionary to work out all the foraged fruits and herbs – ribwort plantain, ground elder and lady’s bedstraw have me puzzling – and the kitchen is no less nature’s patch. Course after course, spruce sprouts, mountain pine needles, larch blossoms and aromatic Swiss pine nuts layer on to plates of buckwheat salad, pillowy potato culurgiones and damn-the-detox rib-eye. Hardly preachy, it’s more about enjoying the instructive idea of the forest-floor bounty, rather than purging yourself of anything reproachfully bad. Even so, at the end of the meal, I abandon the narrative entirely, breaking loose with a bark-infused cocktail, muddled with mountain pine, whisky, blackened nuts and beetroot. Another with larch, brandy, apple and ginger swiftly follows.
Regret invariably arrives the next morning, but for a wholly different, gut-punching reason. All too soon I need to head home to lockdown Britain, but how I wish I could travel back in time; to step into Forestis unaware and with fresh eyes, high above the clouds and through the looking glass, ready to strip nude, enjoy the best fruits of the forest and embrace my inner-dwelling tree.
The detail
Rooms on half-board basis at Forestis (forestis.it) start at £366 a night (based on two sharing). Flights to Verona with British Airways (ba.com) are due to start in February 2021; from £54 return. Overseas holidays are currently subject to restrictions.
