ANASA Wellness & Spa reopened at Patmos Aktis on 22 May 2026, the same day the resort itself returned to Grikos Bay. The word is Greek for breath. The spa was repositioned rather than refreshed — it is the closing phase of a renovation that has worked through the guestrooms, the suites, the villas and the public rooms of the resort, and that leaves the wellness floor and the restaurants as different propositions from the ones that stood there before.

A word that means breath

ANASA occupies the lower level of the building, beneath the rooms and the terraces, which is where an island spa belongs: cool, quiet, out of the glare. The resort’s own account of it is unhurried — treatments and therapies drawn from the raw remedial power of nature, addressed to body, mind and spirit at once rather than to the face alone. The plant behind that language is plain and complete. There is an indoor pool, a sauna and a steam shower, a training room fitted with exercise systems, dumbbells and floor mats, and a room set aside for nails. At the end of it sits a small store carrying herbal remedies and the preparations the spa recommends, which is a more honest gesture than a retail wall.

What the final phase moved

The reopening brought 33 new suites in a wing built for them, among them beachfront rooms and rooms with pools of their own. The transformation was led by Stylianidis Vaggelis Architects, with interiors by Patricia Anastassiadis, whose earlier work includes Fairmont Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro and 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 further guestrooms promised for 2025; the new wing arrived with the 2026 season.

The table moved with it. Barolo, an Italian restaurant with a following in Athens, arrived at Grikos Bay with the reopening, set against the Dodecanese light rather than transplanted whole. Plefsis, the old taverna on the water, was kept — fish brought from the nearby islands, home cooking, the sunset over the bay — which is the harder and better decision of the two.

The island as the method

The wellness offering is the part worth reading closely, because it looks outward. Alongside the treatment rooms the resort set out yoga, meditation, sound healing and guided hiking, with dedicated wellness weeks given over to the same. Its own framing places all of it against two things: the spiritual inheritance of Patmos, and what it describes as the island’s Blue Zone manner of living.

The second of those is a claim the resort makes and we would not press. The first is simply the ground. Patmos has been a place of retreat for nine centuries, and the discipline it teaches is not a treatment but a pace — walking rather than being driven, silence rather than programming, the day arranged around light and hours instead of a schedule. A spa that sends guests out on foot into that, and that gives a week to it rather than an afternoon, has understood where it is standing. Sound healing in a room above a bay this quiet is a different proposition from sound healing in a city.

The bay it looks onto

Grikos is a small seaside village on the island’s south-eastern shore, facing the islet of Tragonissi across a sheltered bay. Above it stands Chora, whitewashed and close-built, with the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian on the hill; below the monastery lies the Cave of the Apocalypse. Both were declared World Heritage Sites by UNESCO in 1999, together with Chora itself. Skala, the port and the island’s largest settlement, is a short run north, and it is where the ferries come in.

This is not an island that trades on its beaches, and it has never carried much in the way of resort building. What Patmos offers instead is a rare thing among the Aegean islands in high season: quiet as the ordinary condition rather than the luxury. A wellness floor at Grikos Bay does not have to manufacture calm; it has to avoid interrupting it.

For those who would take Patmos slowly, and stay long enough for the walking and the hours to do their work, the house makes the introduction.