In South Africa, Wellness is Not a Trend

In South Africa, wellness is not a passing trend. It is a way of life – woven into land, lineage, and community. From ancestral plant rituals to mineral springs bubbling beneath ancient baobabs, every corner of the country offers renewal.

Here, wellness is shaped by people who carry centuries of healing knowledge. By villages where storytelling is medicine. By retreats where silence becomes sanctuary.

Mzansi’s vast landscapes – from mountains and coasts to villages and cities – each offer their own path to restore the body and soothe the soul.

Recently, during a visit to Stellenbosch, I was reminded of this truth. Beyond the wine estates and oak-lined streets, I found that wellness here is also about slowing down – walking through vineyards at sunrise, sharing food grown from the soil, and letting the mountains hold you in their quiet presence. It felt like a doorway into the deeper wellness that South Africa, as a whole, embodies.

South African wellness is not just self-care – it is soul-care.

Healing with Plants

In South Africa, plants are more than medicine – they are memory.

Buchu, once used by the KhoiSan for purification, is still revered today as a cleansing herb. African wormwood (Artemisia afra) is burned to lift heaviness of body and spirit. And imphepho, with its fragrant golden leaves, remains one of the most spiritually significant plants in South Africa – burned in ceremonies as a sacred call to the ancestors.

At Ekhaya Lempilo Cultural Village in Soweto, guests are guided through ancestral cleansing, herbal steams, and dream interpretation. In Plettenberg Bay, Oppidum Retreat invites guests to forage wild herbs in the fynbos hills. And in Franschhoek, Sterrekopje Healing Farm transforms herbs into teas, tinctures, and oils by hand – affirming the land as collaborator, not commodity.

These are rituals of remembrance – herbal, ancestral, embodied.

Healing with Water

Across South Africa, mineral springs have long been sacred sites of prayer and renewal.

In Limpopo’s north, Tshipise, A Forever Resort, rests beneath baobabs where thermal waters bubble at 58 °C. Generations have soaked here, finding release and restoration.

Further south, in the Overberg, the Caledon Hotel & Spa offers an elegant take on hydrotherapy, built around natural iron-rich hot springs. Guests flow through pools and steam rooms, drawing on a million litres of mineral water released daily from deep within the earth.

Each spring is a reminder: healing is not something we chase – it is something we return to.

Healing with Storytelling

In a village in the Amathole Mountains of the Eastern Cape, Xhosa grandmothers gather guests by the fire to share stories alive with land, womanhood, and wisdom. Visitors are invited to share their own stories too, creating circles of remembrance and reverence.

Here, storytelling is medicine – reminding us who we are and where we belong.

Healing with Sisterhood

At Earth and Ember Retreat in the Soutpansberg, yoga beneath cliffs, mindful bush walks, and meditation among giraffes and zebras become daily rhythms of renewal.

In Namaqualand, Naries Namakwa Retreat offers stone suites carved into the mountainside, trails of solitude, and skies that stretch forever. Here, wellness is slow, grounded, and deeply personal.

These are not escapes. They are pilgrimages. Journeys of returning. Journeys of becoming.