Hot, wet, and bothered

It had been a while since I last set foot in Therme, a year at least, and there is a reason for that. For all its international fame, boosted without pause by the stream of influencers who flood Instagram (and probably Tik-Tok, which I refuse to download) with photos and videos of the place, I have never really been its biggest fan. Which means this, perhaps, is not the most objective guide to Therme ever written. But I will try to keep it accurate at least.

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Once inside, having paid and got changed (get your timing wrong and you will queue to pay and get in; more hereafter) there are three distinct areas to Therme. Galaxy is where the water slides are, which makes it full of children, permanently heaving and probably best avoided (unless, of course, you are one of those actually visiting with children, or you’re an adult who likes water slides). Palm is the Instagram star, forbidden to the under-14s but not, alas, to influencers. Elysium upstairs meanwhile is another over-14s zone, given over to saunas and mineral pools and the general business of paying money to feel better. (I believe it’s known as wellness, one of the modern world’s most utterly shite words).

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The scale of Therme is never short of impressive. Therme opened in 2016 and is, as its biggest fans and advocates will remind you at every opportunity, the largest complex of its kind in Europe, with some 800,000 plants under a set of retractable glass roofs and room for 4,000 bodies at once. It has been one of Romania’s most-visited attractions more or less from the day it opened. All impressive stuff. It does nothing for the basic problems, of which there are a few.

The first is that there is not, in fact, all that much water at Therme. If you want to swim, as in do a few actual lengths of a swimming pool, then this is not the place for you. There is building work going on next door on what looks like an extension, but as far as I know it does not include Therme’s most glaring omission: an actual swimming pool.

Second, it is packed at almost all hours, the only broad exception being first thing on a weekday morning (and even that’s not something you can hold me to). It’s very much a victim of its own success on that front. A live occupancy metre is shown on Therme’s website homepage and in its app, which is a (very loose, in our experience) guide to whether the place is busy or not. Counterintuitively, perhaps, things ease a little during the summer, when the outdoor areas and the large urban beach open up, but otherwise avoid weekends unless queueing is your idea of a good time.

Third, you cannot bring your own food or drink. No picnics here. If you are the sort who turns up at the local lido with a bag of sandwiches and a few sausage rolls (as your correspondent likes to), this, again, is not for you. To be fair, by the standards of Bucharest, these days a pricey city in which to eat and drink, the food at Therme is not a rip-off, and nobody is trying to fleece you. The rule is probably more about hygiene than money. It is still annoying, given that every other ștrand in Romania I’ve ever been to positively encourages picnicking. Then again, Therme would insist that it is not simply just another ștrand.

Four. It is not cheap. Adults pay 102 lei on a weekday and 117 at the weekend (about 17 and 20 UK pounds), and that buys you three hours; the under-14s pay just over half of that. Work out which ticket you actually need and you meet a small maze of zones, upgrades and time slots that feels designed to relieve you of a bit more than you might have meant to spend. For a family it adds up to a costly morning or afternoon. On this visit I blagged the pensioner rate (playing the over-50s card successfully) and can confirm the reduction is not, shall we say, life-changing. A rented towel is 31 lei, the compulsory flip-flops 35. Make sure you bring your own.

Five, the clientele can be very posy. Think women who do their hair and make-up before getting in the water, not after. The overwhelming impression is of a great many people who are here for the sake of being here, because it is trendy, because the photograph matters rather more than taking a dip in the water.

Six, it is a pig to reach without a car. There is a bus, the No. 442 from Piața Presei (it stops at the airport too), which leaves once every 20 minutes on weekdays, but at weekends it comes once every half an hour, which is not much use at all. An Uber or Bolt from the centre of Bucharest can these days (at busy times) run to 80 lei or so.

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What Therme gets right, and it gets right emphatically, is cleanliness. The staff swoop on the smallest transgression instantly and will not tolerate any nonsense. This is not, it has to be said, always the case in Romania.

So, is it worth it? On a quiet weekday morning, yes, just about. It’s a pleasant experience and there are worse ways to spend a bleak Bucharest Tuesday. Like much of planet Earth, however, it would simply be far nicer with far fewer people.

But is it worth boarding a plane for? Because that, more and more, is the real question people reading these lines might want answered. Therme now pulls in around 1.3 million visitors a year, roughly a third of them from abroad. A British branch has long been promised for Manchester, which might one day spare the English (at least) the trouble of a flight. Until then, my answer is no. Don’t get on a plane to Bucharest simply to visit Therme. You will be disappointed, unless posting on Instagram that you were here is the entire point of the trip. For some, alas, it probably is.