Luna Jaguar Spa Resort: A Funny Feeling
Of all the things I did in and around Copán Ruinas, Honduras with Stephanie during my trip there, the one I feel most compelled to comment on is our trip to the Luna Jaguar Spa Resort, an open-air spa and bathing facility made possible by the natural thermal water that pours out of a hillside not far from the town of Copán.
Stephanie’s guidebook, the Lonely Planet guide to Honduras and the Bay Islands, mentioned the hot springs as a possible side trip, and also mentioned that the site had been or was soon to be bought by an Italian or Italians who were thinking of developing it as a resort. That seems to have already come to pass, and I wanted to write this to add to the record that I’ve been to their facility and that I have my doubts about what they’ve done and how they’ve done it—to the point that I regret having supported the Luna Jaguar Spa Resort with the price of my admission. But the best way to approach this, I think, is to tell a story.
Hot water mixing with cold river water in the lower (undeveloped) portion of the hot springs at Copán. Picture by Stephanie.
Luna Jaguar, and the hot springs themselves, are pretty close to town. Stephanie and I rolled up late in the afternoon with our companion, who lives nearby. We’d been told we were going to the hot springs, and we were psyched. It had been a long day of walking around, and we needed a bath. Besides that, I’ve always loved geothermal baths of all kinds; one of the best things about going to college in the Pacific Northwest was the hours I logged at Bagby and Cougar hot springs, to say nothing of the anonymous warm, muddy holes in the ground my friends and I located using soak dot net.
The hot springs are on a nicely manicured piece of ground, with a parking lot that gently slopes off down towards the river. There’s a ticket shack, an outdoor cold shower, a place to change into your swimming clothes, and typical lush flowers and plant-life all around. It was a national holiday in El Salvador, so the lot was full of cars with Salvadorean plates. The mood felt festive but mellow, just right for a group bathing place. We went into the ladies’ area, changed, and came back out to meet our friend. He explained that there were a few concrete pools of different hotness on this side of the river, and that on the other side of the briskly flowing but wadeable stream, hot water poured down from the springs above, making a nice warm but not too warm area where it mixed with the cold river water rushing past. The spa part, he said, was up above, but we didn’t have tickets, so…
There was an awkward silence. Stef had heard that the upper part was amazing, and I’d never been to a hot spring thing that I didn’t like; we both wanted to go check out the spa. Is it worth it?, we asked. Our friend looked at us and said nothing. Would you wait if we…? Sure, he said. I’ll be down here. If you’d like to go up there, go.
We went back to the ticket shack and paid for admission. It cost something like 200 lempiras, which is about ten American dollars. More than we’d been used to paying for much of anything over the last week, but we’d decided to splurge… An attendant let us into the narrow suspension bridge that hangs above the river and leads to the spa.
What can I say about the spa itself? It’s quite impressive in there. Luna Jaguar has been built to resemble, or at least pay homage to the Mayan ruins in the surrounding area. There’s lots of dark-gray rock set off by deep green leaves. The resort is pretty large; it took an attendant at least ten minutes to show us all the pools, the massage area, the foot bath, the mud bath, and the vapor area. Besides two young men talking on a cell phone in the uppermost pool, we seemed to be the only guests. “This is beautiful!,” we said, running around and wondering where to bathe first. It was beautiful, but the longer we stayed, the more it also started to feel weird. The attendant kept popping up—was he watching us to be helpful, or watching us to be sure we didn’t do anything bad? More than that, the carefully constructed pools and the Mayan gargoyle logo on the ubiquitous signs started to make me feel more like I was at a Disney-built attraction, or in the Rainforest Café at an American mall food court circa 1994, than in Honduras at the place where all the people hang out at the hot springs. And then the obvious occurred to us: this isn’t the place where all the people hang out at the hot springs. The people don’t have ten American dollars to spend on something like a day’s recreation, not most of them. This is like the new restaurant in your neighborhood that you can’t afford. The one they tore down your old favorite restaurant to build.
The Mayan ruins at Copán cost me $15 American to get into, and it seemed exorbitant to me—but they’re a UNESCO-recognized site of historical importance, and they have maintenance costs, and I’m okay with that. More importantly, it’s my understanding that there’s a different price there for me and for non-tourists: folks from Central America can get in for much less. I don’t think there’s any similar deal at Luna Jaguar. There we were up above. Everyone else was down below. Some guy in a polo shirt-based uniform was watching us, and suddenly we felt very, very uncomfortable in our festive bikinis.
We quickly tried out a handful of the bathing pools, briefly got lost, and finally found our way back to the suspension bridge, which now seemed odiously cutesy to me, perfectly sturdy but made to look rickety and rustic. The sun had set and the light was fading fast. We found our friend near the entrance gate with a towel around his shoulders, reading a newspaper at a table by the ticket counter with his freshly-bathed dog at his feet. “How was it?,” he asked. It was our turn to be silent. He told us we had time to check out the river if we still wanted to.
The rocks were slippery and a little bit hard to see in the fading light, and my skin cringed from the first touch of the swiftly flowing cold water. Stephanie urged me in, up to my ankles, up to my knees. The first head-below plunge into the blackness felt great. “Let’s play mermaid princesses!” she said. For a few minutes, we giggled and screamed, feeling much better.
I don’t know the real story behind the Luna Jaguar Spa Resort, much less the nuances of it. I’m sure that some have argued the project’s value to the community, from the point of view of economic development, attracting more tourists, or even turning a vigorous gush of hot water from the earth into something more elaborate and architecturally optimized. I can only speak from my experience that the spa ‘above’ didn’t have any of the fine, fraternal feeling of the scene below. In fact, it felt like the worst kind of tourist attraction: newly constructed for the purpose of making money, and in the process blocking access by local people to an amenity that was once enjoyed by all.
If that’s not what is going on, I’d be happy to hear about it. But if you are traveling to Copán and wondering whether the upper springs/Luna Jaguar are worth a try, I’d advise you to save your lempiras for the sculpture museum at the Ruins, a couple plates of really good comida tipica in town, or even a few rounds of 23-year-old rum. You can get all the warm, fuzzy, thermal goodness you need alongside the Salvadoreans and Hondureños down below.
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