A spa inside a twelve-room house

Most palace spas operate on an industrial scale. Rows of treatment rooms, rapid turnover, interchangeable practitioners. The treatment is good, often. The experience is standardised, always.

The Palais Rhoul spa works differently. Not by stated principle, but by nature: a twelve-room house cannot run a spa the way a three-hundred-room hotel does. The practitioners are few, carefully chosen, and they stay. What that changes in the quality of a treatment is difficult to summarise — but guests who return from one tend to say the same thing: you could feel that the person was truly present.

Marie

Marie is the only practitioner of Massage Authentique in Morocco. She also practises reflexology year-round. This is not a marketing title — it is a reality of training and practice. Finding this level of care in an establishment of this size, in Dakhla, is a circumstance few guests anticipate and most remember.

The treatments

Draining massage, palper-rouler, oriental relaxing massage, reflexology, Lao massage on futon. The traditional Moroccan hammam — black olive soap from the Palais's own northern farms, kessa, ghassoul, white and green desert clay — is practised as a complement to a massage, never alone. Treatments are available from 10am to 8pm, on reservation. For residents, booking is arranged upon arrival.

For outside visitors

The spa is accessible to non-residents, on reservation via spadakhla.com. It is one of the rare opportunities in Dakhla to receive a treatment of this quality without staying at the property.

Some guests come to Palais Rhoul for the lagoon, for the kitesurfing, for the table. Many leave saying that the spa was the thing they had not planned for — and that they will come back for it.

Reservations and enquiries by email only.