VILLA CLARA, Cuba. — Along a nearby road located on the edge of the Hotel Elguea located in Corralillo, the guide leads three or four guests interested in the history of the place. He warns that the thermal center of the facility has been closed for some time and that the only option available to bathe in the mineral waters is to walk about 300 or 400 meters from there to the old spa in the area.
A wire and zinc gate separates the perimeter of the hotel from this hidden natural treasure. The guide himself is in charge of opening and closing it so that the cows do not destroy what little remains of the medicinal station. At first glance it doesn’t look like anything extraordinary, just a simple quagmire with a strong smell of sulfur.
Legend has it that a slave from Francisco Elguea’s crew caught a skin disease, for which he was separated from the others and sentenced to wander alone in those places. A short time later, the man returned fully healed, revealing to his owner the mystery of that miracle.
For several weeks, the slave had immersed himself in some warm springs very close to the Elguea farm, who began to exploit that natural treasure at the end of the 19th century and which remained a family business until it passed into the hands of the regime in the year 1960.
During the seventies and eighties, the place was especially frequented by thousands of foreign tourists attracted by the benefits of the prodigious mineral waters, until little by little the structure succumbed to neglect and the passage of time.
The man who leads the group of national visitors takes a little white cream from the smallest wells with his hands and massages it to apply it to the face of one of the clients until it forms a greenish mask.
He explains that biobrea is a “holy remedy” for acne and pregnancy spots and that if a cosmetics MSME were to exploit the benefits of this area, the profits would be in the millions. Almost weekly this hotel worker collects the mass in question and dries it in the sun to pulverize it and use it for his own benefit. He is a little over fifty years old, but he looks much younger.
(Photo by the author)
(Photo by the author)
(Photo by the author)
The forgotten fountain of eternal youth
Around the history of Elguea there are fables of people who arrived in wheelchairs and left walking and of others who in a very short time recovered from ailments declared insurmountable.
The hypermineralized waters of these natural springs are rich in salts of chlorine, sodium, bromine, sulphides and also contain radon. Not surprisingly, this spa was recognized among the most important in Latin America and even described by many as “the Cuban fountain of eternal youth.”
An investigation by the Havana Radiation Protection and Hygiene Center warns that the waters of the “Elguea” Spa were used for years for different therapeutic treatments such as: relaxation, revitalization, anti-stress, against obesity, difficulties with the locomotor, respiratory and circulatory and neurological problems.
On the esplanade where the old baths are located, there are several roofless ruins that still preserve their veneered pools, despite having been abandoned almost 25 years ago. Also some pieces of wood that were part of a bar mechanism to help transfer patients with motor difficulties.
Through a system of canals, the water from these cisterns, which are fed by a constant flow, is dredged and introduced. One of them was named “the handsome man’s pool” because the temperature of its waters exceeds 43 degrees and you can barely stay inside, if you can stand the heat, for a few seconds.
In another of the baths, the dividing wall for men and women survives, just as if it were a Roman bath, with small compartments once used for massages and mud therapy.
The tour guide points out that there is no danger, that you can safely enter the hot water pool despite how destroyed it looks. Of course, he warns that no more than ten minutes for first-timers. Back at the hotel, both the supervisor and the hikers agree that any investment in this area would yield more fruits than losses.
However, for many years the thermal center paralyzed its commercialization as a tourist focus. A report from the newspaper itself Granma published in 2019 acknowledges that “if the state of the aforementioned thermal station is painful, it is even worse that of the old baths”.
This center adjacent to the hotel was inaugurated in 1998 and had three swimming pools, individual bathtubs with massage motors, a sauna, and other services that used the thermal waters and muds of the spa. So far, the workers of the place themselves do not know if there is any project to rehabilitate it.
