It’s very rare to find a space that fundamentally feels healthy – but that’s just the sense that settles on you the second you click your car’s ignition off in the car park at Santé Wellness Retreat & Spa. The Paarl air is crisp, the distant mountains look freshly-laundered and the imposing stack of buildings before you are pristine – and all this, before you’ve even set foot in the door.

This is not the place to come for a gentle patchouli-scented prod and a glass of bubbly in the jacuzzi as you ponder a pedicure. The property has every iota of its attention laser-focussed on wellness, rather than pampering – though there’s certainly plenty of that on offer, too.

Every facet of the Santé experience – from the retreat, the spa, the accommodation, to the dining experience and every plant on the grounds – is geared towards fostering a genuine sense of wellness in its guests. The facilities are all there (steam rooms, hydrotherapy and vinotherapy baths, saunas, an indoor heated pool and jacuzzi, a labyrinth and a fitness centre) and the boxes are all ticked, but it’s the inherent culture that sets the property apart from any simple spa experience as natural practices combine with expert scientific and holistic technologies to create what could possibly be considered as the ultimate sanctuary for anyone wanting to genuinely heal and rejuvenate.

The Day Spa – the largest in the country – is home to just about every type of treatment you could possibly imagine, but again, the key to it is a series of proper consultations with the staff to get to the root of what brings you to Santé. There isn’t a therapist on the team with less than 15 years’ experience in the wellness industry – and it shows, as they tailor packages to maximise the experience and tackle the underlying issues, rather than the symptoms. There are a host of therapies on the menu beyond the normal spa fare, including a ‘Pro-Sleep’ massage, which combines custom oil blends, touch with specialised brushes and relaxation-inducing music (not a pan-pipe in hearing range) to  relieve feelings of anxiety, uplift the mood and help promote relaxation. While individual treatments can be booked, there are tailored spa journeys which harness the best treatments for Relaxation, Detox, Rejuvenation and Anti-Ageing, specifically.

Accommodation in any of the 31 rooms – split between 10 spacious Retreat Suites, 20 even-more luxurious Spa Suites and a Deluxe Retreat Suite – sumptuous, at the very least. Each room is completely different, immaculately decorated and generously appointed and boasts staggering views across the manicured gardens in which a Carey Carter sculpture of a figure evocatively arcing its back in a heart-opening Bhujangasana yoga pose, has pride of place. In the distance, the mountains of Paarl and Franschhoek are a study in distance shading and there’s not a sound alien to nature, in earshot.

Food is a major part of the wellness focus at Santé and Chef Terrence Ford and his team at the nourish restaurant will dismantle everything you think you know about low-GI meals created without the presence of sugar, dairy, gluten, preservatives, colourants, additives or hormones. Creating dishes sans any of those elements would seemingly suggest the delivery of plates filled with either vapid floral arrangements or tasteless, colourless mystery items, but Ford’s food screams ‘vitality’ in colour, flavour and form. Not exactly vegan or vegetarian (though that’s an option with advance warning to the kitchen) each meal is worth the trip, alone, and the food at Santé stands proudly alongside the finest produced by any fine dining kitchen in the country.

While eating healthy and staying fit have always been part of Ford’s personal philosophy, the idea that every component of each meal at Santé should be healing to the body tested his levels of creativity and awareness in preparing the right food and forced him to start thinking about food in a totally different way. Organic wines and spirits are also on the menu, to ensure that every aspect of the meal maximises nutrition – without having to deprive yourself of the comforts.

Santé is also home to the only Health Optimizing Royal Retreat on the continent. Based on technology honed in Norway by researcher Thomas Asknes while on the hunt for solutions to his own health problems, Health Optimising seeks to diagnose the underlying issues causing disease and then helping the body self-correct. Without making outrageous claims, the technology does seem to have a reasonable success rate in identifying and solving many health challenges that conventional and alternative medicine struggle to cure. Health Optimising treatments at Santé see clients undergoing all-encompassing medical assessments on an array of high-tech devices to understand if and where cellular, tissue and organ imbalances and dysfunction occur, what the underlying trigger and causative factors are, before harnessing the body’s own mechanisms to correct them.

Go high-tech, go low-tech, go relax, go get nourished – just go find yourself in a beautiful valley in Paarl. For more, visit www.santeretreat.co.za.

*A version of this article appeared in Lowveld Living.