ANASA Wellness & Spa reopened at Patmos Aktis on 22 May 2026, the same day the resort itself returned to Grikos Bay on Patmos. The word is Greek for breath. The spa came back with a new purpose. It was the last phase of a renovation that had already worked through the guestrooms, the suites, the villas and the public rooms, and it left the spa and the restaurants offering something different from before.
The spa
ANASA is on the lower level of the building, beneath the rooms and the terraces. That is a good place for an island spa: cool, quiet and out of the glare. The resort describes it calmly, as treatments and therapies drawn from the raw healing power of nature, for body, mind and spirit together. The facilities are simple and complete. There is an indoor pool, a sauna and a steam shower, a training room with exercise machines, dumbbells and floor mats, and a room for nails. At the end is a small shop with herbal remedies and the products the spa recommends, which feels more honest than a wall of retail.
What the last phase changed
The reopening brought 33 new suites in a wing built for them, among them rooms on the beach and rooms with their own pools. Stylianidis Vaggelis Architects led the work. The interiors are by Patricia Anastassiadis, whose earlier projects include the Fairmont Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro and the Palácio Tangará in São Paulo. Patmos Aktis had opened as a Luxury Collection resort in June 2024, with all 56 guestrooms, suites and villas renovated and more guestrooms promised for 2025. The new wing arrived with the 2026 season.
The restaurants changed too. Barolo, an Italian restaurant with a following in Athens, came to Grikos Bay with the reopening, adapted to its new setting. Plefsis, the old taverna on the water, stayed, with fish brought from the nearby islands, home cooking and the sunset over the bay. Keeping it was the harder decision of the two, and the better one.
The island as the method
The wellness programme deserves close reading, because it faces outward. Beside the treatment rooms, the resort has yoga, meditation, sound healing and guided hiking, with wellness weeks given over to them. It sets all of this against two things: the spiritual inheritance of Patmos, and what it calls the island’s Blue Zone way of life. A Blue Zone is a region where people are said to live unusually long lives.
That second idea is the resort’s claim, and we would not press it. The first is a fact about the place. Patmos has been a place of retreat for nine centuries, and what it teaches is a pace: walking instead of being driven, silence instead of a full timetable, and days shaped by the light. A spa that sends guests out on foot, and gives that a whole week instead of an afternoon, understands where it stands. Sound healing in a room above a bay this quiet is a different experience from sound healing in a city.
The bay it looks onto
Grikos is a small seaside village on the south-eastern shore of the island, facing the islet of Tragonissi across a sheltered bay. Above it is Chora, the whitewashed hilltop town, built close around the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian. Below the monastery is the Cave of the Apocalypse. The monastery, the cave and Chora itself became World Heritage Sites in 1999. Skala, the port and the largest settlement on the island, is a short distance north, and the ferries come in there.
Patmos is not known for its beaches, and it has never had much resort building. Even in high season, among the Aegean islands, quiet is ordinary here.
Who is this for
ANASA suits a guest who wants a slow week of treatments, walks and stillness on a small island. The spa’s treatments use products by the British brand Ila, made from plants, flowers and herbs, with rose petals from India as their main ingredient, and the team plans each guest’s programme around their own needs and goals. Above the spa, suite terraces with narrow pools face whitewashed houses and boats moored in the bay, and balconies on the beach face the headland across the water.
