The Great Victorian Bathing Trail—One Swim at a Time

I’m standing beside the Yarra River because it carves by means of Melbourne beneath skyscrapers shimmering within the January solar. Except it’s not the Yarra. My information, Rob Hyatt, explains that within the Wurundjeri language, yarra merely means “flowing river,” which colonial surveyor John Helder Wedge mistook for its place identify. This waterway is correctly known as Birrarung—river of mists and shadows.

“Until colonization, this was all wetlands and lagoons,” says Hyatt, a Wotjobaluk man who runs experiences at Koorie Heritage Trust, a First Peoples cultural heart in downtown Melbourne. Waterfalls supplied contemporary water separate from the salt water of Port Phillip Bay, “and it was crystal blue—you could see to the bottom.” I peer on the floor and see solely my reflection.

In Australia, a continent that’s 70 p.c arid, water has all the time been a significant useful resource, each for the folks indigenous to the land and the settlers who appropriated it for his or her flocks and herds. Since the Sixties, when the nation started selling its shoreline to worldwide vacationers, its surf and extensive white seashores have been apparent attracts for vacationers. But the water experiences I’m right here for are much less about browsing and suntans: I’ve come to comply with the Great Victorian Bathing Trail, which opened in 2024 to attach pure springs, spas, and sea swimming pools.

Victoria, the second-smallest state in Australia (after Tasmania), is dwelling to a lot of the nation’s mineral springs, and their waters have lengthy been believed to have useful results, whether or not you swig them or soak in them. Several springs alongside the path have been as soon as sacred websites to their conventional custodians. “We know the Aboriginal people here would have known about them, but we don’t know how they would have used them,” Hyatt says. Other stops embrace bathing websites that date again to greater than a century in the past, when immigrants first established European-style bathhouses right here. Some are much more latest, with up to date amenities for soaks, salt floats, and distinction remedy, which alternates between hot and cold water immersion.

The Bathing Trail stretches virtually 560 miles between Portland within the west and Mount Hotham within the east. I’ll comply with a portion of it because it curves round Port Phillip Bay, heading southeast from Melbourne to the Mornington Peninsula, then crossing the bay and circling again as much as the Daylesford space northwest of the town, the fountainhead for 80 p.c of Australia’s pure mineral water.

For some folks, the thought of a spa break that includes 250 miles of driving could also be lower than interesting. But holing up for per week at a wellness retreat has by no means been my factor. I like to be in water, however all that natural tea and tinkly background music makes me really feel as if I’m pretending, enjoying the a part of somebody on trip. To really chill out, I must be on the go. Perhaps this bathing path, which presents the chance to strive all kinds of water-based actions, would possibly assist me recognize an method to wellness I’ve lengthy missed.

Heading out of Melbourne, I’d deliberate to cease for a swim. But within the seaside city of Dromana, on the Mornington Peninsula, the wind thwarts my plans, conjuring a harmful swell; even a stroll alongside the sand is a battle with invisible forces. An extended row of colourful seashore huts fronting the dunes suggests it is a standard spot, however I see solely a few decided canine walkers, hoods up. “Normally, this is the calmest beach,” certainly one of them assures me. He even reveals me footage on his telephone to show it.

As I start my drive inland, the peninsula’s charms turn into extra apparent. After a steep ascent up Arthurs Seat, a landmark 1,000-foot granite hill with views over Port Phillip Bay, I strike out alongside the principle ridge towards the southern coast. Much of Mornington is a nationwide park; wending by means of Cape Schanck, with its red-capped lighthouse and low cliffs furred with vegetation, I can see why.

By early afternoon, I’ve arrived at Alba Thermal Springs & Spa, the place every little thing appears purposefully designed to gradual you down. I’m instructed, in peaceable, elongated tones, that there are 25 swimming pools right here of various styles and sizes, and the water is of course heated in underground aquifers to temperatures starting from 98.6 to 109.4 levels Fahrenheit.

Geothermal exercise was first recorded on the peninsula in 1979, though the Bunurong folks, the land’s conventional homeowners, have lengthy had a cultural connection to the waters of this area. About 40,000 years in the past, over the last Ice Age, the recent springs will need to have been welcome to the migrant people strolling the land bridge between right here and Tasmania. Alba, which opened in 2022, is a mile away from Peninsula Hot Springs, created 20 years in the past when a pair of brothers drilled a 2,000-foot bore into the earth to channel the underground movement into synthetic swimming pools; Alba’s water immediately is sourced from a geothermal aquifer that very same distance underground.

For somebody not accustomed to a spa break, Alba is a sophisticated place to start out. The low-lit inside presents like a futuristic area station. What seem like partitions are literally computerized doorways; sculpted stone benches is likely to be teleportation platforms. I handle to get misplaced within the brief distance between the altering rooms and the exit to the swimming pools, that are organized alongside a terraced hillside.

I discover that a lot of the swimming pools at Alba are occupied by folks in pairs, and I’m too shy to slip in subsequent to them. Eventually I spot an empty one: a shallow round basin that appears like a birdbath for people. I wriggle down till I’m lined to my neck in pleasantly heat water. The naturally occurring minerals—sulfur, magnesium, calcium, and potassium—are believed to have stress-free and restorative advantages when absorbed by means of the pores and skin, loosening tight muscle tissues, boosting pores and skin well being, and enhancing lymphatic movement. But the very first thing I discover as I shut my eyes is my ideas: Is this what different folks name calm? If not, what’s? How do I chill out extra rapidly?

Over the course of the afternoon, I hustle from bathtub to bathtub, dunking myself like an overused teabag. I spot a bunch of younger ladies who’re clearly regulars and ask them how one can obtain a extra zen-like state; they inform me to “go with the flow.” It’s useful recommendation once I’m in Alba’s elegant restaurant that night, on condition that I’ve by no means dined in public in a gown earlier than.

The subsequent morning, my limbs are drained to the marrow. Is this the work of the vitamins? In my discombobulated state, the small seaside city of Sorrento, the place I’ve headed to catch the ferry, looks like a hallucination. Its structure is a mixture of European types, together with Swiss chalet and French château. At Amalfi-style cafés, residents and vacationers sit beneath lemon-colored parasols.

After I drive onto the ferry and park my automobile on the ship deck for the 40-minute journey to the Bellarine Peninsula, I stand on the passenger rail, watching beachgoers race one another into the surf. As the ferry hugs the coast, the clear turquoise water rolls gently towards a row of fantastical homes, every with a non-public jetty and a motorboat (and the occasional helicopter). Then a shuffle of passengers signifies a brand new sight on the opposite facet. I comply with and see a pod of a half-dozen dolphins browsing and spinning in our foamy waves, embellishing the efficiency with occasional arcing leaps.

We disembark within the city of Queenscliff, inhabitants 1,516, and I cross its slender spit of land to the hamlet of Point Lonsdale, solely barely bigger, with 3,788 residents. Near the purpose itself, on the finish of a driveway fringed with alliums, stands a farmhouse repurposed as Lon Retreat & Spa, the place company like me can bathe within the mineral waters that run by means of the limestone beneath our toes.

With seven rooms, the Lon is a boutique affair. For a complete afternoon I’ve the place to myself. I spend my time beneath a Swedish “soak bucket”—full of freezing-cold water you tip over your head with the pull of a wire—dousing myself with its brief, sharp shock earlier than I set out, invigorated, on the character trails that wind across the grounds. Seven generations of the identical household have labored the encircling farm, and there are nonetheless good-looking black cattle grazing on the land, greens within the kitchen backyard, and olives ripening within the groves.

But I flip away from all of that to a location on the map marked “Moonah Forest.” For 20 minutes, I work my approach round a area, encountering solely flies, snakes, and errant balls from the neighboring golf course. A peculiar odor seems to be the candy, briny aroma of an enormous salt marsh, the place a black swan swims backwards and forwards.

The forest itself is a slender strip of woodland, and but its Moonah timber are as enchanting as their identify. Twisting, twining limbs that may have been drawn by a Disney illustrator lean in as if in welcoming embrace. Trunks creak like swings in an empty playground, whereas wind whistles by means of foliage. The flies have been changed with butterflies the dimensions of my fingernail, and a long-tailed lizard crosses my path for a couple of panicked steps earlier than seizing up within the useless hope of camouflage. Here comes an epiphany: I would like my water remedies with a real-earth expertise like this one—not one thing so separate, sanitized, and perfumed.

The subsequent morning, I drive a half hour west to Geelong. With 189,239 folks, Victoria’s second-largest metropolis might have solely a fraction of Melbourne’s inhabitants, however it has been a vacation spot for sea bathing for the reason that mid-Nineteenth century, when women and men have been anticipated to take to the water in separate enclosures. Enriched by the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s, Geelong’s Eastern Beach waterfront was steadily developed right into a public leisure vacation spot; the artwork deco bathing advanced that stands right here immediately, full with a 1927 brick pavilion, was the final of many such spots created round Port Phillip Bay, and it’s the one one to have survived.

I would like no signal to seek out it. The huge, semicircular boardwalk that delineates the ocean pool—painted in purple and blue strips—is seen from the street on the high of the cliff. Within its shark netting, you would fortunately accommodate a number of battalions of swimmers, though in the mean time, only some children cannonball from diving platforms whereas their dad and mom use the buildings to sunbathe. I run throughout the sand into the water with out noticing if it’s heat or chilly. Teenage boys collect on the high of the 32-foot board, their speak fluttering throughout the water as they promise backflips their our bodies won’t ever try.

Salty and glad, I dry myself off and level my automobile north. Hepburn Springs, some 60 miles from Geelong, lies within the nation of the Dja Dja Wurrung folks, who have been the primary to attract on its therapeutic waters. The tiny city turned the epicenter of the state’s spa tradition in Victorian occasions, when Swiss-Italian immigrants acknowledged the therapeutic qualities of the pure mineral waters and, in 1865, established Australia’s first reserve to guard them from mining exercise. Today, they’re nonetheless free to drink, hand-cranked straight from underground aquifers through pumps dotted throughout the city’s park.

Each pump comes with a board itemizing its mineral content material and properties. I begin by filling a cup on the Soda Spring; it tastes like seltzer that’s gone flat, however the sodium bicarbonate will supposedly assist to steadiness the pH of my bloodstream. The water from the Locarno Spring, only a brief stroll away, is fizzier, and incorporates larger ranges of calcium (good for bone density) and magnesium (key for muscle tissues and kidneys). At the Sulphur Spring, the water’s rotten-egg stench almost makes me gag, however I maintain my nostril and swallow anyway, aware of its detoxing advantages.

It’s a brief stroll to the Hepburn Bathhouse & Spa, whose receptionist guarantees me that it’s not solely gullible vacationers who sip from the park fountains. “We’ve got regulars here who swear by them,” she tells me. “They won’t drink anything else—they’re here every week to fill up their bottles and their drums.” I’ve already handed the spa’s authentic 1895 bathhouse, a reasonably pavilion with an octagonal roof and stained-glass home windows that now operates as a café and occasion area. Another historic bathtub, constructed within the artwork deco model within the Nineteen Twenties, is a leisure space.

A $1.2 million renovation in 2025 included updates to the prevailing magnesium salt pool and steam room and the set up of a salt-wall sauna. I’m booked for a 90-minute cross and am delighted to find that the glass-walled baths look out onto a creek lined with eucalyptus timber. With heavy reductions for locals, households bathe en masse within the communal areas; dad and mom inform their children to maintain one eye on the window and shout after they spot a wallaby.

A few regulars see me battling the submerged couches within the jet pool and present me how one can hook my legs, so I don’t hold floating away. Before I do know it, we’re within the hammam scrubbing one another’s backs with peppermint-scented salts, and Helen—whom I’ve simply met— is sharing her life story. The venting of the steam muffles all however the occasional phrase—“husband . . . Oslo . . . education . . . Lombok . . . chef . . . Beijing”—so I uncover little or no. But I study that Helen is an adventurous girl, and that spas don’t must be a lonely expertise simply since you arrive at them alone.

Hepburn Springs has 368 residents, the neighboring nation city of Daylesford virtually eight occasions that, however even there everybody appears to know one another. In the early night, I cross by an ornate piece of aquatic structure, the three-tiered Wills Square Fountain, on my approach to dinner. Kadota, the Japanese fantastic eating restaurant, is a neighborhood’s suggestion. Chef-owner Aaron Schembri grew up right here, and when he was younger, Daylesford nonetheless had a hippie vibe, with numerous communal events the place his jazz singer mom would carry out. He spent a decade touring as he discovered his craft—together with a 12 months working in a Michelin-starred kitchen in Japan—and returned along with his spouse Risa Kadota (now the restaurant supervisor) to a “far more polished” place.

As I sip on house-made tea at Kadota, the couple stops by my desk to ask how I’m doing. I inform them I’m effectively—earlier than realizing, in a spasm of self-reflection, that I actually am. It’s not simply that I’m filled with beautiful kingfish sashimi or sunchoke custard. I additionally really feel calm, rested, content material. Aaron acknowledges these signs; he’s a frequent customer on the Hepburn Bathhouse, the place he likes to take a seat and assume. He additionally tells me he will get the water he makes use of for brining fish and simmering greens from Daylesford.

My remaining cease earlier than heading again to Melbourne is Lake Daylesford, created in 1929 so as to add to the burgeoning spa city’s enchantment. Two of the world’s most accessible mineral springs are situated close to the lake, to the south of city; miners uncovered them as they looked for gold. It is certainly an exquisite place, however not with out blemish. Often, engineering work blocked or polluted the springs—you’ll be able to nonetheless discover remnants of their mine shafts and equipment in a number of of the creeks—and the land’s conventional homeowners, the Dja Dja Wurrung, had already been dispossessed by settlers.

Around the lakeshore, instructional boards reveal the tales of Daylesford’s completely different communities. One reveals an Indigenous art work that demonstrates the fishing and weaving that beforehand happened right here; one other quotes a Dja Dja Wurrung elder talking of the fields of edible daisies that after made this land so useful resource wealthy. Elsewhere, black-and-white images present well-to-do vacationers in fur coats and feathered hats.

I decrease myself into the lake from the grassy financial institution and push off. There’s an exciting sensation as my arms break the nice and cozy floor, whereas my legs plumb the water’s cooler depths. The voice of a kid paddling within the sandy shallows reaches me like a mantra, a well-earned message of the brand new methods I’ve seen and felt wellness on this path: “The more we do it, the more fun it is!” Moving slowly by means of the water, I say a zen amen.

How to take this journey

Australia’s Great Victorian Bathing Trail stretches greater than 550 miles alongside Victoria’s southern coast, linking scorching springs, spas, and extra. Unless you’ve greater than per week, it’s greatest to give attention to a single a part of the route, which is split into three sections: West, North, and East. Or, as contributing author Emma John demonstrates, you’ll be able to loop round it from Melbourne. Here’s how.

Begin in Melbourne, Victoria’s capital. The 257-room Ritz-Carlton is situated within the central enterprise district and has panoramic views of the encircling metropolis and Port Phillip Bay. In the Southbank neighborhood, Hannah St. Hotel opened in late 2025 with a 66-foot pool and 188 boutique rooms and suites.

A 60-mile drive south brings you to Alba Thermal Springs & Spa on the Mornington Peninsula. Raise your pulse on a piece of the peninsula’s 62-mile stroll, or decrease it at Alba, the place 25 geothermal swimming pools and a full menu of hydrotherapy remedies make a convincing argument for staying on the property.

Continue eight miles west to Sorrento, a port city with a distinctly European really feel. From its waterfront, board the Searoad Ferry to the small city of Queenscliff on the Bellarine Peninsula; the 40-minute crossing runs hourly, year-round.

Located 5 miles southwest of the ferry port in Queenscliff, Lon Retreat & Spa occupies a modern sandstone farmhouse the place company can get pleasure from a sauna, chilly plunges, holistic spa remedies, and personal mineral baths. The boutique seven-room resort is a member of Small Luxury Hotels of the World.

Continue to Victoria’s second-largest metropolis, Geelong, roughly 19 miles northwest. It gives some ways to benefit from the waterfront, from strolling the Bollard Trail Walk, lined with greater than 100 painted sculptures, to swimming at Eastern Beach, dwelling to a 1927 brick bathing pavilion that now homes a restaurant.

Travel 60 miles north to Hepburn Springs, lengthy the center of Victoria’s spa nation. Its free-flowing waters rise from underground aquifers, and indicators all through the city element the mineral content material and purported advantages. The Hepburn Bathhouse & Spa—Australia’s first, opened in 1895—continues to be in operation, whereas the unique bathing area is now a café.

Daylesford, a mile south, is understood for its eponymous lake. In between swims, stroll to the 100-foot Sailors Falls, hike 6-million-year-old Hanging Rock, and gas up at Cliffy’s Emporium, a historic common retailer and diner opened within the Nineteen Fifties. From right here, it’s simply 70 miles again to Melbourne. —Katherine LaGrave