Blue Moon Travel 020-8202 2028 a href=http://www

Blue Moon Travel (020-8202 2028; www.bluemoontravel.co.uk) organises travel to Balikli Kaplica in Kangal, Turkey, for such treatment. A two-week trip costs £999 per person including flights, transfers and half-board accommodation and treatment.Erna Low (020-7584 2841) offers trips to Terme di Saturnia, one of Italy’s most famous spas It stands at the foot of a medieval village in Tuscany. The waters, said to help alleviate stress, skin and weight problems, rise to the surface at 37C and flow into four pools. A one-week trip costs approximately £1,545 per person including return flights, transfers, full-board accommodation and treatment programme. Thermalia Health and Beauty Holidays (020-7483 1898; www.thermalia.co.uk) operates a variety of healing holidays to spas in Hungary, Greece, Italy and Spain.For something different you can stay in a teepee at the exclusive hideaway Dunton Hot Springs (001 970 882 4800, www.duntonhotsprings ), high in the mountains of Colorado (£250 per night).At many hot springs you can simply turn up and avail yourself of the waters for a small fee Check whether you need to bring a towel though.

Alternatively you can stay at the large number of hotels bordering many of the hot springs locations.What if i’m perfectly healthy?You don’t have to be ill to enjoy a dip. In Japan, bathing in hot springs (onsen) is a cultural activity and more recreational than therapeutic.People visit the onsen to socialise with family and friends. They don a yukata (a light cotton kimono), relax, eat, drink and soak up the atmosphere There are about 2,300 across Japan. Many have become concrete jungles, but 100 or so have clung on to the tranquillity and beauty of old Japan.

These are known as hito – hidden hot springs, some of which can only be reached by a long hike.KR Tours ( www.krtours.co.uk, 020-7499 7611) offers tailor-made itineraries to Japan, staying in traditional Japanese inns (ryokan) and incorporating a trip to the hot springs of Hakone, 55 miles/90km south of Mount Fuji from £1,500 per person for one week including flights and accommodation.What else are they good for?Boiling eggs, skinning chickens and pigs You name it. On the Paria Peninsula in Venezuela the hot springs are used by locals as an extension of their kitchens. Clambering up beside the steaming rock pools, the surrounding rocks are covered with downy feathers and carcasses, the stench of the mineral rich waters combining with the cooking flesh.Upstream – and thankfully upwind – the gushing river water has mingled with the hot springs to create pleasant bathing pools.In Iceland, people have harvested the local geothermal heat for centuries. In the town of Hveragerthi the people used to wash their clothes in the hot water and bake bread in special steam boxes.

They eventually harnessed the heat for use in their homes by building pipes from the springs to transport it to cisterns in their houses. Today half the houses in the area are still heated in this way. Taking the watersThere are 12 spa towns in the UK where people traditionally went to bathe in or “take” the waters: Bath, Buxton, Cheltenham Spa, Droitwich Spa, Harrogate, Royal Leamington Spa, Llandrindod Wells, Malvern, Matlock Bath, Strathpeffer, Royal Tunbridge Wells and Woodhall Spa. Bath, however, has always had special status as it contains the only hot springs in the UK. The water, which started life 10,000 years ago as rain falling on the Mendip Hills, bubbles up at a constant temperature of 46.5C and at a rate of a quarter of a million gallons a day. Legend has it that the springs were discovered around 500BC by Bladud, the father of Shakespeare’s King Lear.